Former Spanish leadership favourite resigns after CCTV captures her shoplifting face cream

Cristina Cifuentes recently faced controversy over allegedly fake master's degree

The career of one of Spain’s most high-profile conservative politicians was in tatters Wednesday thanks to an alleged seven-year-old shoplifting case involving two 20 euro pots of anti-ageing cream. Madrid regional president Cristina Cifuentes, a leading light of Spain’s ruling centre right Partido Popular [PP] party, was once tipped as a successor to Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

Instead, Ms Cifuentes resigned after a three-minute video surfaced online of her emptying her handbag of items and handing them to a security guard in a grimy supermarket backroom. The video, published by website OKDiario, shows Ms Cifuentes – at the time when she was deputy for the Madrid regional assembly – apparently finally paying for the anti-aging creams, worth 40 euros in total.

The security guard later reportedly said the case did not reach the courts because Ms Cifuentes had paid for the products.

The scandal comes hard on the heels of another major controversy involving Ms Cifuentes, well-known for taking a hard line over the corruption scandals that have repeatedly enveloped the PP, over an allegedly fraudulent master’s degree.

Doubts have emerged over whether she had read her thesis or even attended classes, and a signature on one key document was said to have been forged, provoking a police inquiry.

But Ms Cifuentes, who blamed the university for any errors, had refused to stand down. With the fallout from the “shoplifting” video, the political pressure has seemingly proved too much. Ms Cifuentes’ resignation is the latest crisis to hit Mr Rajoy’s troubled minority government, already struggling to get its budgets approved in parliament this year. The government is also battling a seemingly unstoppable rise in popularity of rival centre-right party Ciudadanos, and is bogged down in a seemingly interminable standoff with the Catalan pro-independence movement.

Ms Cifuentes said she was leaving her position as president of the Madrid region, one of her party’s most valued political assets, with her head held high, and that she had been the victim of a mudslinging campaign.

“It’s probably part of the price of having a zero tolerance policy towards corruption,” she insisted, before calling the shoplifting incident “an involuntary mistake.”

Ms Cifuentes claimed that she had been planning to resign on 2 May, shortly before opposition parties were planning a vote of no confidence, in order to avoid a leftwing government taking control of the region. Mr Rajoy, previously supportive of Ms Cifuentes, said decision to quit had his backing. “She did what she had to do,” he said.