Pedro Sánchez knows that his words carry weight. When I sit down with Spain’s prime minister in Moncloa Palace – in the cream-coloured Tàpies Room that he uses to receive guests and which is adorned with works by Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró – he is on-message. The soft-spoken 53-year-old has seen his profile surge as the leader of the West’s most progressive government, and as a rare European who has consistently stood up to Donald Trump. “We are a pro-Atlantic government,” Sánchez tells me. “But that doesn’t mean submission.”
After Trump threatened a 25 per cent tariff on a number of European allies unless Denmark sold Greenland to the US, Sánchez said the US president’s threats “would make Putin the happiest man on Earth” and be “the death knell for Nato”. Trump appeared to back down after negotiating a deal with Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, but top European officials are still reportedly unclear on what the terms are. Greenland has become more of a fixation for Trump ever since the US’s 3 January strike on Venezuela, which prompted a subdued response from most European leaders. Yet within hours Sánchez called the capture of Nicolás Maduro a “violation of international law” and then joined Latin American leaders in condemning the exploitation of Venezuela’s resources after Trump said the US would seize its vast oil reserves.
But it may be Sánchez’s position on Gaza that distinguishes him most. Spain recognised a Palestinian state in 2024 and Sánchez is the most senior European leader to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s war on Gaza. While other leaders have prevaricated, he announced various measures – including barring Spanish ports and airspace to be used to transport fuel or weapons to the Israeli military – in order to increase pressure on the Israeli government. He was also unequivocal in declining to join Trump’s Gaza “Board of Peace” because it sidesteps the UN and lacks Palestinian input. He is clearly plugged in to the view in the Global South, and increasingly shared by Europeans, that Western leaders have engaged in “double standards” over their response to Gaza. By contrast, he tells me, “we are consistent, we are coherent”.
These foreign policy positions have played well in Spain. Sánchez is also delivering in other ways for his country. Spain is the fastest-growing major economy in Europe and he continues to make the case for immigration on a human and economic level – even as both mainstream conservatives and social democrats like Keir Starmer adopt the nationalist rhetoric of the right.
Has the Spanish approach been overlooked? What can other European leaders learn from Sánchez’s bolder, unabashedly left-wing approach? While he is diplomatic on this, his team is more candid. “We feel that most progressive governments have failed or are failing in the Western world because they’re too conservative,” his chief of staff, Diego Rubio, tells me. “And I don’t mean that they are too right-leaning: they’re too afraid of saying the things that have to be done.”
Sánchez was born in Madrid on a leap-year day, 29 February 1972, to parents who worked as civil servants. He was a natural athlete as a teen, frequenting breakdancing circles in the city’s financial district (“Now it’s even an Olympic sport,” he notes) and played for the under-21 Estudiantes basketball squad.
The leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Sánchez could be described as a cosmopolitan technocrat. He completed a master’s degree abroad at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a PhD in economics at Camilo José Cela University in Madrid, where he worked as a lecturer. He is the first Spanish prime minister to speak fluent English.
His political rise was bumpy. He was a virtual unknown when he won the PSOE leadership in 2014 in its first ever open primaries. He then led the party to its worst election defeats in history in 2015 and 2016 amid lingering voter anger over his predecessors’ austerity policies. When he refused to allow the centre-right Mariano Rajoy and his People’s Party (PP) to form a government in 2016, PSOE grandees orchestrated Sánchez’s sacking. But he contested the 2017 PSOE primary, audaciously campaigning across Spain in his 2005 Peugeot on an anti-establishment platform, winning back the party leadership. The following year he brought forward a no-confidence vote as a corruption scandal engulfed Rajoy, which led to Sánchez becoming prime minister in June 2018.
Since then, Sánchez has cobbled together a series of coalition governments – initially with the left-wing party Podemos, and then, following the 2023 election, with Sumar, another left-wing party. His decision that year to offer amnesty to the leaders of the Catalan separatist movement – who orchestrated a banned referendum in 2017 and declared independence – in exchange for parliamentary support provoked fury among nationalists. But it may have also helped “diffuse” an issue that was “really poisoning Spanish politics, because there was no obvious solution to it,” Nigel Townson, a history lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid, told me. “That was an example of his extreme pragmatism.”
The years that followed saw Sánchez win praise over his handling of the economy. A tourism rebound after Covid and key investments in clean energy have helped keep growth high and inflation down. But a historic immigration surge has been Spain’s true driver: in a country with an ageing population, two-thirds of new jobs are now filled by migrants and they have delivered 80 per cent of GDP growth over the past six years. “There is a moral dimension but also a pragmatic dimension to migration,” Sánchez says. There is a “cold demographic reality” that Western societies have to face and “ask ourselves… whether we open our societies and boost growth or we close ourselves and shrink”.
To tackle inequality, the Sánchez government has also hiked the minimum wage over 60 per cent since coming to office. The usual warnings about a knock-on effect on jobs have not materialised; the unemployment rate, though still high, continues to fall.
There may be lessons for Starmer here. The Labour government is overhauling immigration based on the hard-line Danish model. That risks undermining the government’s chief mission to make the UK the fastest growing G7 economy, while the use of conservative rhetoric has helped give the Greens an opening – and Labour continues to poll behind the far-right Reform.
Sánchez’s aides tell me they are keen for a deeper partnership between the only two major European nations led by social democrats. Sánchez and Starmer held a bilateral summit in September, to sign a post-Brexit deal over Gibraltar. “This issue of Gibraltar was like an obstacle to break through,” Sánchez says, adding that both he and Starmer recognise the “clear need” to learn from one another. When asked about whether Spain would support the UK rejoining the EU, given polling in both countries favours such an outcome, Sánchez is resolute. “Absolutely,” he says. “We miss the UK within the European Union. I think there is a clear need to have the UK on board again, especially nowadays.”
A day before our interview Sánchez visited the abandoned Campamento barracks on the outskirts of Madrid. There he greeted his housing minister, Isabel Rodríguez García, with a wide smile and double kiss before inspecting a display of construction plans. “The new Campamento neighbourhood will have 10,700 affordable homes,” said Sánchez from a podium in front of the gathered press. Then a digger whirred up its engine and bit into the building behind it, leaving a gaping hole in the facade.
Addressing a housing crisis is hardly the only challenge Sánchez faces. For the past two years, corruption allegations have surrounded senior PSOE officials and Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez. He has pushed back on claims that Gómez used her public profile to secure sponsors for a university course she ran and used state funds to pay her assistant. Sánchez has called the allegations “lawfare”, given Spain’s politicised judiciary, and the fact that the complaint stems from the far-right Manos Limpias group.
But Sánchez has apologised for corruption scandals involving his party; in July he rolled out an anti-corruption plan that included the creation of an independent ethics agency. “We have responded proportionally and strongly,” Sánchez tells me. But not everyone is convinced, and it could pose a challenge for him at the next general election, in 2027. “This is all narrative and nothing at all changes,” Miriam González Durántez, the founder of the civic group España Mejor (and Nick Clegg’s wife), told me. Durántez is also in the process of launching a political party in Spain.
This time last year, Sánchez delivered a speech at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid to mark the 50th year since the death of Franco. Standing before a banner that read “Spain at Liberty”, he announced 12 months’ worth of events to “showcase the great transformation achieved” since the military dictator’s death on 20 November 1975 and to stress the importance of democracy to the country’s youth.
The transition has been remarkable. A nation that endured the bloody 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and four decades of Francoist rule embraced democracy after 1975 – and with it came a shift from Catholic conservatism to one of the most liberal societies on Earth.
That recent history has given Spain an aversion to large military expenditures. It was the only holdout at the Nato summit in June 2025 in which allies agreed to boost defence spending from 2 to 5 per cent of GDP, a target that was something of a fudge to placate Trump – and which Sánchez warned would jeopardise social welfare spending. Sánchez says that a more sustainable approach is to think about capabilities that could one year get you to “2 per cent of total defence spending, 3 per cent one year, 1 per cent another. But not 5 per cent every year.” He adds: “Sometimes it’s wiser to spend more money on cooperation aid or strengthening multilateralism… than to just buy weapons from the American defence industry.”
But his most immediate challenges now are domestic. Days after I met Sánchez, a rail collision killed at least 45 people in southern Spain (two days later a driver was killed in a second train crash near Barcelona). A state of mourning has been declared as investigators work to determine the cause.
Sánchez is also grappling with a resurgent far right. The young are now more likely to back the nationalistic Vox than older generations who have memories of the horrors of the Franco era. The far-right party has seen its support grow by half since the last election, and polls suggest that PP and Vox are within striking distance of winning a combined majority in parliament after the next election.
Sánchez has said he plans to run for reelection, something his aides confirm to me in Moncloa Palace. He can campaign on a values-based foreign policy that most Spaniards agree with, a record of economic growth and reducing inequality, a successful immigration policy. The polling numbers may not be in the incumbent’s favour but Sánchez has defied the odds before. “He’s a real political operator, and a very effective one,” Townson told me. “Someone of enormous resilience.”
Whatever comes next, Pedro Sánchez believes that, after eight years in power, it is important for him to share his government’s lessons with other social democratic forces across Europe. “There’s a Spanish, progressive way of doing things,” he says, before pausing for a moment to reflect. “And it works.”
[Further reading: The only conspiracy at the Fabian Society conference]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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