Spanish election: Drug trafficker links trigger questions for Feijóo

MADRID — A controversial history of cozy relations between frontrunner Alberto Núñez Feijóo and a notorious drug trafficker burst back into life during Spain’s election contest, threatening to dampen the opposition leader’s campaign for victory ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Feijóo’s conservative Popular Party is on track to become the largest group in the July 23 election, if opinion polling proves accurate — an outcome that would herald a sharp change in direction for Spain after Pedro Sánchez’s five years of socialist rule.

But during a rally in Madrid on Sunday, far-left candidate Yolanda Díaz brought up the friendship Feijóo struck up with Galician narco-trafficker and money launderer Marcial Dorado during the 1990s and early 2000s.

“Feijóo had an intimate friendship with one of the biggest drug traffickers in the world,” said Díaz, who challenged the Popular Party leader to join an upcoming debate to “tell Spaniards about his relationship with drug trafficking.”

“It would be great if he explained his relationship with Marcial Dorado to the lost generation of young people who died using drugs, to the mothers of addicts who took to the streets to fight drug trafficking.”

Díaz evoked Dorado again on Monday, demanding Feijóo explain how he knew the man. Dorado was found guilty of trafficking six tons of cocaine in 2009 and convicted on additional money laundering charges in 2015.

Feijóo’s links to Dorado are a widely known source of recurring controversy in Spain.

After years of rumors suggesting the two knew each other, the politician was first definitively connected to the drug trafficker in 2013, when Spanish daily El País published an explosive series of photographs showing Feijóo sunbathing with Dorado on his yacht.

Taken in 1995, when the politician was a member of Galicia’s regional government, the photographs showed Feijóo chatting with Dorado as the yacht cruised off Vigo, a city on Spain’s northwestern coast, revealing a surprising level of closeness between the smuggler and a man who would soon be called to Madrid to serve in conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar’s government.

Despite being almost 10 years old at that point, the photos became a major liability for Feijóo, by then president of the Galicia region.

Feijóo initially said he had only known Dorado casually. But Spanish media eventually showed ties between the men was much stronger than he claimed and that in the late 1990s they travelled together to Ibiza, the Canary Islands, Portugal and Andorra, a hot-spot for money laundering.

Javier Romero, a veteran journalist specialized in covering narco-trafficking at Galician daily La Voz de Galicia, said that Feijóo’s claim that he was unaware of Dorado’s illicit activities had always been met with widespread skepticism.

“It is hard to believe that he didn’t at least know of his reputation as a contrabandist,” said Romero. “In 1995 Dorado was a well-positioned man with a bunch of legitimate businesses, but also a level of wealth — mansions, boats — that didn’t correspond with his income and would have been hard to ignore.”

Romero said that although the politician had managed to avoid having to resign over the scandal, and even got reelected in the years following the publication of the problematic photos, the link with Dorado had a significant impact on his longer-term career.

“People had been talking about Feijóo as a potential successor to [Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy for years, but this business with Dorado was a major impediment,” the journalist said. Romero said many thought it was the reason why Feijóo hadn’t run in the election for the leadership of the Popular Party in 2018.

Romero added that Dorado’s cameo in this campaign season wasn’t surprising given the tightness of the election. With less than a week go to Sunday’s vote, the center-right Popular Party is leading in the polls but Sánchez’s Socialists appear to be just five points behind.

Neither party is projected to secure an outright majority, which means they will have to form a coalition to govern, if the polling is translated into the official results. The Popular Party is expected to attempt to partner with the far-right Vox party, while Sánchez will seek support from Díaz’s far-left Sumar party.

“We’re used to having this topic come up every time we have elections in Galicia, and now that Feijóo is the national candidate it’s not surprising that it’s being brought up in the national sphere,” said Romero. “It’s odd, because the connection between these two men has never been the subject of a police investigation — no one has really looked into it — but we discuss it every time it’s time to vote.”

“Is it an effective grenade to throw at a political adversary?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s shocking, sure, but I’m not sure that many people will really care about a photo taken 30 years ago.”

The Popular Party did not reply to POLITICO’s request for comment.