PP officials pass off 2024 Sánchez photo as current bulo

According to Público, on Wednesday 26 August 2026 several Popular Party figures, national deputy Rafael Hernando, the party's spokesman in the Madrid Assembly Rafael Núñez Huesca, Lugo deputy Jaime de Olano and Jon Echevarría of the youth wing Nuevas Generaciones, shared a photo on X that supposedly showed Pedro Sánchez holidaying in Andorra while a migration crisis unfolded in Ceuta. Público quotes Hernando writing that people were "suffering the invasion" in Ceuta while Sánchez took a helicopter and the Falcon jet to ride a bike in Andorra, and Echevarría mocking "the grandmothers of Ceuta locked in their homes and this guy on a chairlift in Andorra."

Maldita.es adds the detail that dismantles the whole framing: the image is not recent at all. According to the fact-checking outlet, it comes from a laSexta video clip filmed on 31 August 2024, during the Mountain Bike World Championships in Andorra, nearly a year before the dates the PP officials implied. RTVE.es published its own verification on 27 August 2026 reaching the same conclusion, labelling the chairlift picture a bulo (a hoax) rather than a current photograph.

Público then follows what happened next. It reports that Jaime de Olano deleted his post on Thursday 27 August after being contradicted, one user having quipped underneath, "I didn't know we could now travel to the future." Cross-referenced reporting cited by Público suggests Núñez Huesca later acknowledged the photo was from 2024 without deleting his original tweet, a point the outlet flags as coming from search corroboration rather than a confirmed primary statement. El HuffPost, for its part, highlights the government's reply: Transport Minister Óscar Puente answered the PP spokesman behind the spread with the barbed line used as its headline, roughly that the truly painful thing is that the photo does not mark the end of his own career.

Why is this trending in Spain right now? The backdrop, per Infobae, is a genuine surge of arrivals in Ceuta, more than 1,500 migrants recorded over the last two weeks of July 2026 (around 200 a day), straining a CETI reception centre built for 512 places. That pressure gave the fake photo its emotional charge, and the swift pushback from Maldita.es, RTVE and the government is exactly why "Partido Popular" climbed the Google Trends charts today.

Sources : Público, Maldita.es, RTVE.es, El HuffPost, Infobae, Google Trends.