An eavesdropping scandal is threatening to topple the Spanish government, as the head of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) party threatened on Wednesday to pull his party's support if answers aren't forthcoming about spying on Catalonian politicians.
If someone doesn't come forward and take responsibility for the spying, it will be "very hard to hold up the parliamentary stability of the government," ERC senior member and Catalonian region President Pere Aragonès told radio broadcaster RAC1.
The government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez lacks a majority in parliament and relies upon the ERC to support it on votes. But the ERC has been enraged since a report this week alleging that dozens of leading Catalonian politicians have been spied upon.
Relations between Catalonia and the central government have been fraught for years and reached a low point in 2017 when the regional government forced an illegal independence referendum. Several leading Catalonian politicians ended up in exile or imprisoned.
The government has recently tried to restore relations, but that has been put at risk by the spying allegations.
Aragonès said there needs to be an independent investigation to determine who gave the orders for the spying. Some in Catalonia have pointed the finger at the CNI intelligence agency.
Israeli-made software
The report, based on a study by the Canadian research group Citizen Lab and published in the US magazine The New Yorker, alleges that more than 60 Catalonian separatist leaders, including some of their staff and family, had been subject to surveillance.
Mobile phone of politicians, lawyers and activists were hacked and monitored between 2017 and 2020 with Pegasus, an Israeli-made piece of software that has been at the centre of multiple recent reports about surveillance. Pegasus' maker, NSO, has said multiple times it has only sold the software to government agencies.
Isabel Rodríguez, a spokesperson for the central government, had said on Tuesday that the government has nothing to hide, but said she could not provide further details since it was a matter of national security. She said conversations can not be eavesdropped upon without a judicial order.
