The Errejón case and the cost of fourth-wave feminism in Spain

The Errejón case, the stress test for the gender industry
Can a single trial bring down everything built by fourth-wave feminism since the summer of the La Manada case? The question hangs over the proceedings against Íñigo Errejón, the complaint filed by Elisa Mouliaá, and the institutional web built around gender equality in Spain. This is not just a court case: it is a stress test for a sector that moves public money and political legitimacy.
A machinery of consultancies, committees and subsidies
The economic debate in the case focuses less on the guilt or innocence of the former MP than on the scaffolding that would have to be dismantled if the narrative cracks. The structure is well known: women's councils, expert committees, equality advisors, university degrees, communications departments and dozens of regional and state bodies. All of it funded by budget lines that have become entrenched over the past two decades. The figure doing the rounds is stark: one million gender-violence complaints since 2004. For one school of thought, that volume justifies an industry which, once created, can hardly be dismantled by a single case, however high-profile it may be.
Presumption of innocence versus narrative
Errejón's defence has raised uncomfortable questions: why the complainant did not say no, why she got into the taxi, why she waited three years to file a complaint. The prosecution, according to what emerges from the proceedings, is trying to delay the politician's testimony, while the defence is seeking dismissal of the case. The trial has become a showcase for the tension between the presumption of innocence and the logic of the complaint as a political tool. Critics argue that the movement has created a framework in which the complainant's word carries more weight than objective facts. Supporters of the prosecution, on the other hand, see in the proceedings a victory of old-style due process over victim protection.
What if the narrative collapses?
The most antiestéticared consequence is that an acquittal becomes a weapon to dismantle equality policies. But scepticism also works against that possibility: the structure does not depend on a single case, but on a very broad social and political consensus. The banks always win, as the most cynical analyses put it. Even so, the case has already had one collateral effect: Errejón's political career is over, as even the sector most critical of the complaint acknowledges. Social condemnation, in this case, has come before the judicial one.
The question left hanging is whether institutional feminism can afford to lose one of its symbols without everything else wobbling. The answer, pending the verdict, remains in the hands of the courts. And of a budget that, whatever happens, will keep paying the bills.