Sanchez has pulled off a masterstroke in Spain – and shown Europe how to beat back the hard right | Eoghan Gilmartin
In May, when Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a snap general election, commentators were divided over whether it was political suicide or a stroke of tactical brilliance. His Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) had just suffered heavy losses in local and regional elections, and polls suggested a conservative far-right coalition was on course to win an absolute majority in parliament.
But of course, those polls were wrong. On Sunday, Sánchez defied expectations and secured PSOE’s best electoral result in percentage terms since 2008 (taking 31.7% of the vote) – thus ensuring Spain broke with Europe’s wider lurch to the right over the past 18 months.
This wasn’t enough to secure Sánchez a clear parliamentary majority. But fighting his fifth general election in under eight years, it was just the latest comeback from arguably the most successful centre-left politician in Europe over the past decade.
While other traditional social democratic parties in Europe have faced decline or polarisation, PSOE has been relatively stable – even when Spanish politics has been in continual flux and crisis. When he first took over the party in 2014, Sánchez was dismissed as a pretty face and as a bland machine politician, but he has proven himself a brilliant tactician capable of audacious political manoeuvres.
His reputation as a political survivor was initially earned after an internal coup forced him to resign as PSOE leader in October 2016. To all intents and purposes, this move left him politically dead. Yet he reinvented himself as the anti-establishment candidate in the subsequent leadership race. In a moment when the left-populist Unidas Podemos party threatened to overtake PSOE as the major progressive force in Spain, Sánchez began to embrace its anti-corporate rhetoric. As he toured the country in his family’s modest Peugeot 407, the career centrist was reborn, with his grassroots campaign generating a groundswell of popular support as PSOE leapfrogged Unidas Podemos in the polls.
His subsequent re-election as party leader in May 2017 was initially met with disbelief by Spanish elites, as they feared a sharp left turn. But Sánchez has always been a pragmatist, and on coming to power in June 2018, he showed great agility balancing the interests of seemingly antagonistic actors. While seeking to maintain the confidence of employers groups and the right wing of his party, he has also engaged the radical left, appropriating parts of its discourse and agenda, as well as constantly renegotiating the terms of a highly sensitive parliamentary alliance with pro-independence Catalan and Basque nationalists.
The political contradictions have at times seemingly left Sánchez backed into a corner and facing a governmental crisis, only for the prime minister to engage in an unexpected pivot that opens up renewed space. For instance, he was initially opposed to a formal coalition government with the radical left out of fear of the influence it would offer its then leader, Pablo Iglesias. Sánchez went so far as to gamble on a second election in November 2019 to force the issue. Yet after his party suffered a worse than expected result at the polls, he negotiated Iglesias’s party’s entry into government within days of the election.
This wasn’t just for show. Sánchez was able to work with his new partners on policy, and Spain’s first leftwing coalition in 80 years delivered important legislative advances around employment rights and gender equality. It has also gone further than most European governments in protecting its citizens from the cost of living crisis. In particular, a successful energy cap and steep reductions in public transport costs (including making commuter and medium-distance trains free for more than a year) were key in bringing inflation down to 1.9% in June.
Many of these measures started off as Unidas Podemos proposals that were only taken up by Sánchez after months of lobbying and initial resistance from his orthodox deputy prime minister, Nadia Calviño. It is unlikely PSOE’s anti-inflationary measures would have been so progressive without Unidas Podemos’ presence at cabinet.
Yet while willing to work with the left as a junior partner, Sánchez’s centrist instincts and his continual triangulation between different actors means he has tended to shy away from tackling issues when it has required directly confronting entrenched elites, not least because of the need to manage pressure coming from his right. In this respect, his inaction on housing over his five years in office and watered-down rent control legislation compares unfavourably with the more radical moves of the socialist administration in Portugal.
In this most recent campaign he skilfully played the anti-fascist card, harnessing the shock of the far-right Vox party’s entry into a series of municipal and regional coalition governments to mobilise progressive voters. As pride flags were being removed from city halls across the country and gender equality initiatives suppressed, Sánchez framed the vote as a binary choice between a similar hard-right coalition at a national level and his own brand of moderate social democracy. His previous alliances with the radical left paid off, as a re-organised left alliance under the leadership of the labour minister, Yolanda Díaz, was also able to get its vote out in larger than expected numbers.
Spain looks set for months of institutional deadlock. PSOE’s unexpected surge has ensured the bloc of leftwing and regional parties backing Sánchez in parliament has one more seat than those on the right, but the balance of power depends on the rightwing Catalan separatists Junts. Fresh elections before Christmas look likely unless Junts’ exiled leader, Carles Puigdemont, agrees to his party’s abstention in an investiture vote. Yet if anyone can find a way out of such an impasse, it is likely to be Spain’s great political survivor, Pedro Sánchez.
Eoghan Gilmartin is a freelance journalist who has covered Spanish politics for Jacobin Magazine, Tribune, Novara Media and Open Democracy