President Pedro Sánchez announced on Monday that he will continue to lead the Spanish government, after five days of speculation about his future.

Last week, Sánchez announced that he would cancel all his official engagements after a court opened an initial investigation into his wife, Begoña Gómez, over accusations of influence peddling.

Sánchez, who has been in power since 2018, called the accusations a harassment campaign orchestrated by right-wing media.

“My wife and I know that this smear campaign will not stop, we have been suffering from it for 10 years,” Sánchez said. “We can handle it,” he added.

His decision last week to take time away from office to reflect on whether he would continue to lead the government came as a surprise even to people in his own Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).

The accusations against Begoña Gómez were presented by the organization Manos Limpias, led by a man linked to the extreme right named Miguel Bernad.

The complaint

The complaint admitted by a court in Madrid against Begoña Gómez states that “taking advantage of her relationship with the president of the government, she would have recommended or endorsed by letter of recommendation with her signature to businessmen who bid for public tenders.”

The document also points out that one of the companies that obtained public funds organized years later a master’s degree in a university program that she directs and that another of them, the airline Air Europa, agreed to allocate funds for an innovation center in Africa that was also charge of Sánchez’s wife.

When the complaint was made known, the president assured that his wife will defend herself in court against “facts as apparently scandalous as they are inconsistent.”

On Thursday, the Madrid prosecutor’s office asked that the investigation be archived due to lack of evidence.

Manos Limpias also acknowledged that the allegations could be incorrect because they were based on online newspaper articles, one of which has already been proven false.

Manos Limpias has gained notoriety by filing judicial complaints about alleged cases of political corruption that have frequently ended up being archived.

In his speech on Monday, which lasted about 10 minutes, Sánchez thanked the messages of support he received, which, he said, weighed on his decision to continue in the government.

He also ruled out that his five-day “reflection” period was a strategy. He noted that he decided to stop out of “conviction”, in order to change the course of politics in Spain.

And he said: “It’s about deciding what kind of society we want to be. Our country needs this reflection. We have been letting mud contaminate our public life for too long.”

Sánchez emphasized that his decision “is not a full-stop.”

“It’s a paragraph, I guarantee it.”

If Sánchez had resigned, he would have become the first president to leave office in the middle of a term since 1981, when Adolfo Suárez did so.