AS SPANIARDS Depart for their summer holidays, Pedro Sánchez must be breathing a huge sigh of relief. In June the shaken prime minister offered profuse apologies after Santos Cerdán, his right-hand man in the ruling Socialist Party, was remanded in prison to face charges of taking at least €620,000 ($730,000) in bribes on public-works contracts. Worse, Mr Cerdán’s predecessor in the role, José Luis Ábalos, also faces trial before the Supreme Court for corruption (both men proclaim their innocence). Mr Sánchez told parliament this month that he considered resigning, but “throwing in the towel is not an option”. Neither his party nor his parliamentary allies (he leads a minority coalition government) have yet forced him to. But he is now on borrowed time, at the mercy of events. With two years to go before the next election must be called, “the government is a lame duck”, admits a senior Socialist politician.
Spain’s political fragmentation since the great recession means that Mr Sánchez has governed in a minority since he came to office in 2018. Until 2023 his coalition was fairly stable. He steered the country through the pandemic and strengthened the welfare state. Since 2022 Spain’s economic growth has far outpaced the European average, while unemployment has fallen to its lowest level since 2008. The first Spanish prime minister of the current democratic period to speak fluent English, he has been an active player abroad.
But things have got much rockier since Mr Sánchez called and lost a snap election in July 2023. He remained in office only because Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s Party (PP), fell four votes short of a parliamentary majority. Catalan and Basque nationalists, as well as the hard left, preferred to stick with Mr Sánchez rather than vote with Vox, a hard-right party. But they extracted a price. This included an amnesty for those involved in an illegal drive for independence for Catalonia—something Mr Sánchez had previously opposed as unconstitutional.
The amnesty has helped to calm Catalonia. But the opposition sees it as an opportunistic move that has undermined the rule of law. In a stinging criticism delivered to the European Court of Justice this month, a lawyer for the European Commission stated that the measure was not “compatible with European values”.
The controversial amnesty is the only substantial law that Mr Sánchez has managed to approve in the 20 months of the current parliament. His allies are increasingly fractious. The government has postponed flagship measures, including one to cut the working week to 37.5 hours and others to “democratise” the judiciary. The latter prompted an unprecedented three-day strike by half of Spain’s judges, who see in them (with a degree of justification) a government attempt to control the courts.
Mr Sánchez has not got a budget through parliament since 2023, and last year he simply ignored the constitutional requirement to present one. Even foreign policy is now hostage to his parlous political circumstances. His refusal at June’s NATO summit to contemplate raising defence spending to 5% of GDP placated his hard-left parliamentary allies, and is popular with Spaniards. But it has infuriated his partners in Europe. To please Catalan nationalists, he defied European policy to block the merger of BBVA and Sabadell, two banks. His foreign minister has irritated other Europeans by repeatedly pushing for Catalan, Basque and Gallego to be accepted as official languages in the EU.
In the past, prime ministers who failed to pass a budget called a general election, as Mr Sánchez himself did in 2019. He now seems bent on survival at all costs. His aides put forward three main justifications.
The first is that he is the victim of “lawfare” and a conspiracy by right-wingers in the judiciary and the media. Legal cases against his wife, Begoña Gómez, for lobbying on behalf of companies that funded a project of hers, and against the public prosecutor appointed by the prime minister for allegedly leaking confidential information, do indeed look thin. But the police reports on the alleged corruption of Mr Cerdán and Mr Ábalos, and their bag-man, Koldo García, have undermined this argument. So has the charging last month of Cristóbal Montoro, the finance minister in PP governments over a decade ago, for allegedly taking bribes (which he denies).
Mr Sánchez’s second argument is that his “progressive” policies are improving Spain. But impressive though the economic-growth numbers are, they depend heavily on adding labour through immigration. Real incomes have increased by much less. And the government has largely failed to deal with an acute housing shortage. So there is not much of a feel-good factor.
Finally, Mr Sánchez was able to avoid a heavier defeat in 2023 by whipping up fears of Vox. His supporters say he is the last bastion of European social democracy against the extreme right. “If Vox didn’t exist, this government would probably have fallen,” says Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid. Despite, or because of, Mr Sánchez, however, Vox is rising in the opinion polls.
Although Mr Cerdán and Mr Ábalos were Mr Sánchez’s hand-picked political fixers, his party continues to back him. Determined to prevent any repeat of a rebellion which briefly ousted him as the Socialist leader in 2016, the prime minister has sidelined all internal critics. “The government is him, the party is him and Spain is him,” says Fernando Vallespín, a sociologist who worked for a previous Socialist prime minister. “The problem for Sánchez is that if he is everything, he becomes the target for everything.”
Officials have tried to limit the scandal to what they call a “toxic trio”. But Madrid’s political world expects further police reports on corruption in the autumn. “His survival depends on what else comes out,” says Mercedes Cabrera, a historian and former Socialist minister. The scandals, and recordings in which Mr Ábalos and Mr García discussed the merits of several prostitutes, are hurting the Socialists in the opinion polls. “The question is at what point [his parliamentary allies] withdraw support because they think the corruption is too much,” says Mr Simón.
Some believe that Mr Sánchez will propose a crowd-pleasing budget in the autumn, and call a snap election if it fails to pass. Such is his political resilience that many others think he will manage to hang on until 2027. But two more years of paralysis would frustrate Spaniards. And the main beneficiary might well be Vox.
