The Federation's damage control in the crisis caused by the non-consensual kiss of Luis Rubiales to Jenni Hermoso will be studied in crisis management schools due to its devastating reputational and social scope for the institution itself in Spanish and international terms, but also It has had a clear reach on the political scene. The matter has turned the languishing situation in which the feminist politicians arrived at the July elections like a sock. Rubiales has once again turned feminism into transversal politics - that is, common sense of the time - that we saw in the massive 8-M of 2018 and 2019, before the fights between Carmen Calvo and Irene Montero and the disastrous communication management that Equality made the controversies around its legislative advances, particularly the effects of the punitive reform of the law of only yes is yes . It has contributed to all this that the scandal unleashed by the attitude of the president of the federation in the celebrations of the World Cup won by the women's team have coincided in time with a devastating summer acceleration of sexist murders.
The flight forward of Luis Rubiales has been felt in the political reactions of both Vox and the PP, which have kept a low profile in the face of a behavior that has ended up being a pedagogy of consent, by opposition, much more efficient than the battle policy deployed during the months of last winter by the Government. None of the formations on the right have aligned themselves with Rubiales, after FIFA itself suspended him from office and, according to the British press, planned an exemplary suspension for him.
This has been one of the paradoxes of the last legislature: environmental and feminist policies –in other words, the fight against the climate emergency and the acceleration of equality policies and against sexist violence– had the character of transversal policies, aligned with a social consensus that should keep them out of the harshest political struggle. However, the early tensions between the already ex-vice president Carmen Calvo – ostensibly upset with the loss of the Equality portfolio – and the minister Irene Montero contaminated the deployment of the ambitious legislative agenda, starting with the Trans law. This long confrontation, together with the unprecedented harassment suffered by the minister in her private home for more than half a year, placed the ministry on the defensive, which was highlighted when criticism of the penal adjustment began to intensify which, in application of the agreement of Istanbul, introduced the Organic Law for the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom. The right toiled in the cultural battle against the new feminist wave and the defensive communication of the ministry ended with the cross-cutting condition of its agenda, becoming a bastion ministry and battering ram of party policies. The media and political contamination lasted for months, accelerated by the attitude of Equality itself, until President Pedro Sánchez decided to apply a political corrective to the ministry, take away the management of the crisis and put the Ministry of Justice in charge of a legislative retouching , more apparent than effective, to the star norm of Equality.
The crash of Podemos in the regional and municipal elections in May, in which the debate around the law of only yes is yes was very present, led the PSOE and Sumar to circumvent the new feminist legislation in the general election campaign July, proven that both the regulations and Minister Montero herself were agents that mobilized the vote of the right.
But all that has turned around in just ten days. The women's world cup has launched the country into a new political scenario. The discreet attitude of PP and Vox has its counterpart in the activity carried out by both the Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, and the Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, from their respective areas. Despite the setback of the Administrative Court of Sports, which snatched from the Higher Sports Council the possibility of immediately suspending Rubiales, yesterday the Prime Minister said that someone like Rubiales cannot aspire to represent Spain and praised the reaction, not only of women's football but of Spanish society in the face of what happened. Something of this explains the picturesque Granada episode of the controversy, in which the confinement of the protest of the mother of the president of the federation did not even achieve a supportive reaction from his native town, Motril, where Rubiales' father was mayor for the PSOE .
The cruel paradox is that this final victory of Equality policies comes when no one counts on the possibility that, in an eventual coalition government, Irene Montero will repeat as minister, and when her party – in serious financial trouble due to the electoral setback of May– has eliminated the Equality Secretariat and has applied an ERE that has been primed with the female workforce. When the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, left the general secretary, he pointed out that the path for the future was to “feminize and de-Madrid the party”. Little more than two years later, three quarters of the remaining workforce are men and the only functional organic headquarters is Madrid.
