Vox leader’s ‘strung up’ remark about Spain PM referred to public prosecutor

Santiago Abascal, who told an Argentinian newspaper that Pedro Sánchez was a politician without ‘moral limits’. Photograph: Daniel Gonzalez/EPA

Spain’s ruling Socialist party has asked public prosecutors to investigate remarks made by the leader of the far-right Vox party in which he claimed a time would come when the Spanish people would want to see Pedro Sánchez “strung up by his feet”.

It claims Santiago Abascal’s comments, made in an interview published on Sunday by the Argentinian newspaper Clarín, are “an incitement to hatred and even violence” and represent “a serious breach of coexistence and the constitutional order”. It also argues that the Vox leader is trying to compare the prime minister to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was shot by partisans and strung up by his feet in April 1945.