Last bastion

Following the German Social Democratic party’s unprecedented third-place finish in February’s federal election, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) has cemented its position as the leading centre-left party in mainland Europe.

After calling a snap general election in July 2023 following a battering by the right in the regional and local elections, prime minister Pedro Sánchez defied the odds to remain in power, renewing his broad left coalition government. This achievement was all the more remarkable for a man who was forced to resign as party leader back in 2016, when the PSOE was at a particularly low ebb and internally divided, before he won back the role the following year.

The natural question is: what has Sánchez got right? A better approach, however, might be to ask what is different about Spain. Euroscepticism is comparatively weak in Spain, for example, as is anti-immigration sentiment, for all the far-right Vox’s attempts to stoke it. Moving further right to compete with Vox has meant the conservative People’s party (PP), which once spanned the centre to the far right, has lost some of its more moderate voters. The liberal Citizens party, which emerged to become the strongest challenger to the mainstream parties by the April 2019 election, disappeared almost entirely after prioritising the right-wing competition with the PP and Vox over who could clamp down most on Catalan secessionism, ruling out collaboration with the PSOE.

Sánchez has also been quite fortunate that Vox’s voters do not generally match the profile of the radical right’s supporters elsewhere in Europe. Studies have shown that, for now at least, it is largely younger men from the higher end of the income distribution moving to Vox, rather than the disenchanted working classes. Another key consideration is that there is no German-style ‘firewall’ against Vox. However reluctantly, the PP has allied with the party to govern at the regional and local levels and would do so at the national level to gain power. As a result, fear of the far right entering government made sure PSOE supporters went to vote in 2023. In this sense, Sánchez’s strategic calling of a snap election paid off.

Beyond that, however, there is the question of parliamentary arithmetic. Right-wing parties hold more seats than the left in the Spanish parliament. The only reason Sánchez is still in power is that those regional nationalist parties with a right- or centre-right economic ideology – most notably the Catalan separatist party Junts and the Basque Nationalist party – will no longer prop up a right-wing Spanish government due to the PP and Vox’s support for recentralisation.

While the performance of the PSOE at the 2023 election remained broadly stable (121 versus 120 seats out of 350 in 2019), the broader change in the composition of the parliament was significant. What was once a competition between the PSOE and the PP is now a competition between left-wing and right-wing blocs, and within those blocs for leadership of each. In 2023, the PP regained significant ground both within the right-wing bloc and overall, winning the most seats. The PSOE also strengthened its position as leader of the left but only because its coalition partner Sumar (previously Unida Podemos), itself a coalition of far-left parties, declined further as it continued to be marred by infighting. This time around, Sánchez had to negotiate with Sumar and six different regional parties to become prime minister, and the latter had even more clout, with the right-wing Catalan party Junts becoming kingmaker with its seven seats. Not surprisingly, therefore, the greatest ‘achievement ‘of Sánchez’s legislature so far has been the passing of the highly controversial amnesty law to end legal action against Catalan nationalists for separatist activities.

That Sánchez has managed to stay in power by negotiating with such a wide range of parties is seen as a sign of fickleness by some, but much-needed pragmatism by others. The only current alternative in Spain’s polarised parliament would be permanent gridlock. Indeed, on occasion, when support from Sumar or the regional parties has not been forthcoming, Sánchez has even proven willing to rely on the conservatives to keep the wheels of government turning. This happened after the debacle over Spain’s landmark sexual consent law back in 2023, which was meant to toughen penalties for sexual crimes but left a loophole allowing some convicted offenders to get their sentences reduced. Sánchez accepted parliamentary support from the PP to pass a revised law when his left-wing coalition partner, who wanted to close the loophole differently, refused to back it. However, this ability to shift alliances works both ways, and not always in Sánchez’s favour. Pushing through a left-wing social and economic agenda is a challenge for a coalition reliant upon the votes of some right-wing regional nationalists. Junts and the Basque Nationalist party both thwarted Sánchez’s attempt last year to make the temporary windfall tax on energy firms permanent. More importantly, he has been unable to pass a new budget fortwo years because of friction within the coalition government and disagreement with the regional parties.

Perhaps Sánchez’s biggest claim to fame is that he presided over a remarkable economic recovery as tourism bounced back after the pandemic. With GDP growth exceeding 3 per cent in 2024, Spain far outperformed its major European neighbours. The evidence is clear that immigration has made a very positive contribution, boosting the working age population In a country with a particularly low birth rate. Sánchez has therefore remained consistent in his defence of immigration on both economic and humanitarian grounds, standing firm against far-right rhetoric. Once again, however, his convictions can be undermined by parliamentary arithmetic. His attempt to reform Spain’s immigration law in July last year to redistribute migrant children across Spain’s 17 regions was brought down in parliament by Junts’ decision to align with the PP and Vox against it.

The key to Sánchez’s longevity may be whether he manages the more difficult task of ensuring the benefits of Spain’s robust economic growth filter down to ordinary people. GDP per capita is not growing as strongly as overall GDP, and the country faces an acute housing crisis. Sánchez has taken some steps to help with the cost of living, such as the introduction of legislation in 2022 to cap gas prices and lower electricity costs. Another key achievement that year was the reform of Spain’s labour laws to reduce the over reliance on short-term contracts that have long blighted the lives of many Spaniards – though in this he got lucky, as it only passed by 176 to 174 votes because of a voting error by one conservative MP.

What, then, can the left beyond Spain learn from all this? It is hard to draw lessons, as the PSOE avoided the incumbency curse in large part due to the specifics of Spain’s situation. These include the way minority governments function, the important role of territorial issues in shaping the left-right divide, the relatively lower levels of concern over immigration (for now at least) and the boost from Next Generation EU funding that has given the country a chance to get itself on a surer economic footing. Labour politicians might be inclined merely to look wistfully at these advantages, but Sánchez’s treatment of the hard right could still prove instructive. With Reform polling level with or even ahead of the Tories and Labour, Sánchez’s experience suggests that adopting the right’s narrative on salient topics to compete with it may not be necessary – indeed, that doing so could be counterproductive. By retaining a clear differentiation between illegal and legal migration to Spain, and raising the prospect of an ugly right-wing coalition, Sánchez may have helped prevent a shift further rightwards in Spanish public opinion and kept his left flank relatively on-side.

Image Credit: Socialist Avascos via Creative Commons