It’s been described as Spain’s equivalent of Watergate. With less than three weeks before Spain heads to the polls for a knife-edge general election, its political arena has been rocked by a series of revelations over spying operations directed at the left-wing party Podemos. On March 27 it was disclosed that the presiding judge in the trial of disgraced police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo had opened an investigation into the 2015 theft of the mobile phone of Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias’s assistant, Dina Bousselham, believing that it had been stolen by Interior Ministry officials. Private messages taken from the phone were later published by right-wing press outlets to whip up controversy over offhand comments the Podemos leader had made about a conservative TV presenter.

This was only the beginning. The following day Villajero, who is on trial for running extortion and espionage operations against political targets, admitted to spying on Iglesias as part of a “criminal” investigation, moreover insinuating that former vice premier Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría (of the right-wing Partido Popular) had been aware of the operation. His testimony was then followed by the disclosure that high-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry had granted residency to a Venezuelan man in April 2016 in exchange for documents purporting to show the existence of offshore bank accounts belonging to Iglesias and other Podemos leaders. The payments in the accounts were meant to have come from the Cuban intelligence services and the Chávez government in Venezuela. Though never verified by the police, and later proven to be false, the information was leaked to the right-wing outlet OK Diario in May 2016 and then circulated throughout national media, at a time when Podemos and the Socialists (PSOE) were negotiating over a possible government coalition.

The intent behind these moves was clear: to harness the Spanish state’s law enforcement agencies to smear Podemos and derail talks on creating a coalition of the Left as they reached a critical juncture. Those responsible came from figures in the highest echelons of Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP) government, who sought to cling onto to power after inconclusive elections. A 2017 parliamentary inquiry found that “the investigation and persecution of political adversaries” took place with “the knowledge and consent” of the PP’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, citing as one example the fabrication of the so-called PISA report on illegal Podemos funding.