No, This Is Not the First Time a Former Spanish PM Has Faced Formal Investigation — History Says Otherwise

The claim is straightforward: that no former Spanish prime minister has ever been formally placed under judicial investigation in recent history. The verdict is equally straightforward — this is false, and the historical record makes that clear.

The strongest counterexample is Felipe González, who served as prime minister from 1982 to 1996. As El País and The Guardian have both reported, González faced serious judicial scrutiny in connection with the GAL scandal — a state-sponsored terrorism operation in which government-linked groups targeted ETA members in the 1980s. His Interior Minister, José Barrionuevo, was convicted. González himself was questioned by judges as part of formal proceedings. Human Rights Watch documented that Spanish courts investigated state actors at the prime ministerial level throughout those GAL proceedings, establishing a clear precedent for high-level executive judicial scrutiny.

More recently, Mariano Rajoy — prime minister from 2011 to 2018 — became the first sitting Spanish PM to testify in a criminal trial when he appeared in the Gürtel corruption case in 2017, according to Reuters. The court ultimately found that his Partido Popular had benefited from illegal financing. BBC News also reported that José María Aznar was called to testify in court in connection with corruption cases involving his party. These are not obscure footnotes — they were major national news events.

To be fair to the strongest version of the claim: the precise legal threshold of being 'formally placed under investigation' varies by case, and some of these figures were witnesses rather than named suspects. But the broader claim — that judicial proceedings have never formally reached a former prime minister — does not hold up. The GAL case in particular involved formal judicial scrutiny at the very top of the González government.

This kind of claim spreads because 'first ever' stories are compelling. They signal a historic rupture, a line being crossed, and they travel fast on social media regardless of whether they are accurate. When a politically charged event occurs, both supporters and opponents have incentives to amplify the drama — one side to condemn, the other to defend. Always check 'unprecedented' claims against the historical record before sharing them.