The Spanish Supreme Court on Monday sentenced former transport minister José Luis Ábalos to 24 years and three months in prison for leading a criminal organisation that extracted bribes from emergency mask contracts during the Covid-19 pandemic. His former adviser Koldo García received 19 years and eight months, while businessman Víctor de Aldama was given four and a half years, with the prison term suspended in recognition of his cooperation with investigators. The unanimous ruling, which the court said involved €430,298 in proven kickbacks, marks the highest penalty imposed on a former minister in Spain’s democratic period for offences committed while in office.

From Madrid, the conservative opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo immediately demanded that Sánchez resign and call elections, describing the prime minister as “the political responsible for the corruption of his ministers in office”. The far-right Vox party echoed the call and pressed Feijóo to table a motion of no-confidence, a step the Popular Party leader has so far declined, arguing it would only reaffirm the government’s parliamentary majority. Sánchez himself is not charged in any of the cases and has repeatedly dismissed the investigations as a politically motivated campaign to unseat him. The Supreme Court’s sentence, however, includes an eight-page preamble warning that corruption “erodes the foundations of the democratic state” by converting public power into an instrument for private interests.

The Ábalos verdict lands as the prime minister’s inner circle faces multiple judicial fronts. A Madrid judge has ordered Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, to stand trial for alleged corruption and influence-peddling linked to a university chair she co-directed; she has been required to surrender her passport and report to authorities twice a month. The same judge, Juan Carlos Peinado, is now the subject of a disciplinary probe opened by Spain’s judicial governance body, the General Council of the Judiciary, after he suggested in a written ruling that police officers assigned to protect Gómez might “on their own initiative or following orders from hierarchical superiors” facilitate her flight. Separately, a former Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is under investigation for suspected influence-peddling.

Viewed from European capitals, the cascade of proceedings is testing the durability of Sánchez’s minority coalition, which relies on a patchwork of regional and left-wing parties. The Supreme Court’s sentence is final, though a constitutional appeal remains theoretically possible. Ábalos and García are already in pre-trial detention; Aldama will avoid prison provided he commits no further offences, performs community service and files biannual activity reports. No date has been set for Gómez’s trial, and the disciplinary file against Judge Peinado is in its early stages. The next general election is not due until 2027, but the opposition’s demand for an early ballot is now a central axis of Spanish political debate.