Spain’s Supreme Court ordered lawmaker and former Public Works and Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos to be jailed without bond on Thursday after deeming him a flight risk ahead of his corruption trial.

Prosecutors are seeking a 24-year prison sentence for Ábalos, who was a top figure in the country’s ruling Socialist Party between 2017 and 2021. The politician is being investigated for alleged bribery, influence-peddling and embezzlement in connection with public contracts during the Covid pandemic.

The former minister is the first sitting member of the Spanish parliament to be imprisoned in the country’s modern democratic history. Although elected as a member of the Socialist Party, he was suspended from the parliamentary group in 2024, shortly after anti-corruption investigators detained his former adviser, Koldo García, for allegedly profiting from the sale of face masks during the pandemic. In a separate hearing, the court on Thursday also ordered García to be detained without bail ahead of his trial.

Resisting calls to step down from parliament, Ábalos has spent the past year sitting with the “Mixed Group” of lawmakers from smaller far-left and nationalist political parties, but has consistently voted in favor of draft laws submitted by the Socialists. His continued support has given Prime Minister Pedro Sa´nchez and his left-wing allies a crucial one-vote edge over the 171-seat opposition bloc made up of the center-right People’s Party, the far-right Vox group and the Navarrese conservatives.

Although Ábalos’ imprisonment implies the automatic suspension of his rights as a lawmaker, he retains his seat until he has exhausted all possible appeals. With the left- and right-wing blocs in Spain’s 350-seat parliament evenly matched for the foreseeable future, the fate of legislation now exclusively depends on the votes of the seven lawmakers representing the Catalan separatist Junts party.

That’s bad news for Sánchez, because last month Junts distanced itself from the Socialists and said it would no longer back legislation put forward by the government, as it had in the past. Unless Sánchez can reconcile with Junts, he will have no reliable way to pass legislation during this term, which is set to conclude during the summer of 2027.