Let’s begin with a confession: Spanish politics is not easy to explain to anyone who has not lived through it. And Pedro Sánchez is not easy to explain either, because he keeps changing, and because change in politics is usually read as weakness, not survival. There was a time, not so long ago, when Sánchez looked like a laboratory politician, built in the workshops of Ferraz, the Socialist Party headquarters, with every answer rehearsed and every tie carefully chosen. The original plan was simple enough: he would be pushed to the front of the political stage to make a pact with Ciudadanos, the centrist party that once seemed like the future of Spanish opposition. That plan failed. It failed so thoroughly that Sánchez ended up doing the opposite of almost everything he had been sent there to do. He had said, with conviction, that he did not want to govern with Podemos because it would not let him sleep. Then he presided over a coalition government with Podemos ministers. He had spoken against amnesty for Catalan independence supporters in terms that sounded permanent. Later he became the main champion of a measure that was, for all practical purposes, an amnesty. The newspaper archives are full of his old statements, preserved like fossils, and his political enemies have spent years digging them up and displaying them as proof of something dark. Yet the strange thing is that these contradictions have not made Sánchez look weaker. They have made him look more alive, more complicated, and more human. A politician who never contradicts himself is either a saint or a liar. Sánchez is neither. He is a man who has been forced, again and again, to choose between what he once believed and what reality demanded. That is not always a comfortable thing to watch, but it is a very human thing to do.
The contradictions that should have destroyed him have, instead, given him substance. Over the last eight years, Sánchez has confronted a significant part of the Spanish power system, including the Felipista wing of his own party, the old guard that still treats Felipe González as the patriarch of Spanish social democracy. Some of the measures he promoted were, in fact, old debts that González never managed to pay. The democratic memory law is the clearest example. It was a piece of legislation about the reparation of the victims of Spanish fascism, about the people who were killed, imprisoned, and erased after the Civil War. González did not know how to approve it, or could not, or perhaps did not dare. Sánchez did. That is not a small achievement. It is the kind of thing that separates a politician who merely survives from a politician who actually changes something. In doing this, Sánchez became an unusual figure in Spanish democracy. He dared to govern with the support of all those who are not the heirs of the side that won the War. That phrase might sound abstract, but in Spain it is still made of flesh, blood, memory, and mourning. For decades, the official story was that a government could only be built on the consent of the old power structures, the Church, the financial oligarchy, the media, the judicial elites, the descendants of Franco’s coalition. Sánchez broke that unwritten rule. He built a government that did not depend, exclusively, on the sons and grandsons of the victors. That is the source of the fury against him, and also the source of his historical importance.
The latest twist in the story has a tragicomic edge. Junts, the Catalan independence party led by Carles Puigdemont, has definitively withdrawn its support from Sánchez’s government. That withdrawal triggered the calling of early elections, even though it is hard to understand what Junts thought it would gain from the move. Perhaps they wanted to show that they were not hostages of Sánchez, that they were still the masters of their own destiny. But the result is that they will now be aligned, electorally, with the Partido Popular and Vox, two parties whose leaders, and especially whose militants, would be very happy to see Junts outlawed. There is a dark comedy in that. A party built around the idea of Catalan independence, and around the rejection of Spanish centralism, finds itself in the same trench as the most centralist and reactionary forces in the country. The only thing they share is a common enemy. That is not a political coalition; it is a vendetta. And vendettas, as Sánchez well knows, can be more violent than coalitions, but also more blind. By helping to force these elections, Junts has not humiliated Sánchez. It has delivered him into a plebiscite, which is exactly where he wants to be. Because when you are under attack from every side, the clearest way to answer is to ask the whole country the old question: who do you side with? That is what the next election will be. It will not be a normal election. It will be a refereeing of the strange, unresolved Spanish argument about who gets to govern and who merely gets to complain.
For a large part of the left-wing electorate, Sánchez has never been a providential leader. He has not been a charismatic icon or a perfect vessel of progressive dreams. He has been something more modest and, perhaps, more useful: the only viable ally they have. And their loyalty, reluctant as it may be, has been rewarded in a surprising way. The right and the far-right, in their obsessive campaign to topple him, have made visible things that used to be hidden. The word lawfare has entered the ordinary vocabulary of Spanish citizens. The separation of powers, that abstract ideal from civics textbooks, has become an urgent subject because it has been openly attacked. A substantial part of the judiciary now appears, in broad daylight, to work at the service of the political interests of the right and far-right. That is not an accusation made by Sánchez alone; it is a conclusion that many people have reached after watching the courts produce rulings that coincide, with suspicious precision, with the electoral calendar of the right. Sánchez has also earned a solid, indisputably positive assessment among progressives around the world for his positions on some of the most difficult international questions, including the genocide in Gaza and the war in Iran. While the Popular Party could only follow the lead of a Trumpist pachyderm with an orange tint, Sánchez has refused to abandon the language of international law, human rights, and basic decency. In a world where most leaders prefer to be careful, that has turned him into an exception. His enemies thought they were destroying him by revealing his contradictions. Instead, they have given him a global audience.
Now Sánchez has called elections that are, without any disguise, a plebiscite on his own figure, and on the project that he has built and that has been built around him. He is sincere when he says that for him it is not over, and that he sees himself governing until 2030 and beyond. There is no reason to doubt him. He has the stamina of a man who has been attacked for eight years and is still standing. The legislature that ended this Monday has also been the legislature of disinformation, a period in which lies were manufactured at industrial speed and distributed through every available channel, all of it in service of hate speech. None of this was accidental. It was promoted by the same coalition of right and far-right forces that now faces the electorate. Their program is not a program; it is a refusal. They have spent years refusing to accept the legitimacy of a government they hate. They have used the law as a weapon, the media as a megaphone, and social networks as a sewer. In the fifty-four days until the elections, we will hear them and see them roar with more fury than ever. The noise will be enormous. But noise is not the same as truth, and fury is not the same as strength.
And yet, behind all the smoke and contradiction, there is a simpler story, a more human one. A man who was once designed to be harmless became the most polarising figure in his country. His enemies have made him into a metaphor, a battleground, a mirror in which Spain is forced to see its own unresolved history. The contradictions are real. They will not disappear. He said one thing, then he did another. He changed his mind when the circumstances changed, and he did not apologise for it in the way that his critics wanted. But the same man who was accused of betraying every principle also managed to push through legislation that had been postponed for decades. Democratic memory, labour rights, feminist reforms, housing measures, dignified foreign policy, a serious attempt to govern with the descendants of the defeated rather than only the descendants of the victors. None of this makes him a saint. It makes him a fighter, and in politics, that is often the only thing that works when the other side has already decided that your existence is an insult. As the next fifty-four days unfold, the question is not simply whether Sánchez wins or loses. The question is whether Spain can accept that all of its people belong to the same country, that a government can be formed with the support of the descendants of those who lost the War, and that the old ghosts do not have to rule forever. The newspapers full of old quotes will still be there, and so will the accusations, the lies, the lawfare, and the roar. But history will also record that Pedro Sánchez did not run away. He held the line, and he made his contradictions matter. In a world where most politicians are careful, that is something rare. It may even be enough.