In the middle of April, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summoned the world’s leftist statesmen to Barcelona for what he called a Global Progressive Mobilization. There are not many leftist statesmen to choose from these days. But Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico and Lula of Brazil rallied round Sánchez, and so did the representatives of activist philanthropies—Bill Gates’s people and George Soros’s, too. Various agitators came for environmental and sexual causes, with their earrings and keffiyehs and polyglot t-shirts.

It was a coronation of sorts. Through an assiduous campaign of policy-shaping, speech-making, China-courting, and Trump-trolling, Sánchez has managed to identify himself to many non-Spaniards as the leader of the global opposition. What Trump explores, Sánchez deplores. Boss of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (PSOE) with only a brief interruption since 2014, prime minister since 2018, and president of the Socialist International since 2022, Sánchez was accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza within weeks of the 2023 Hamas attacks. In 2025 he repudiated the promise of other NATO leaders to increase their defense spending to 5% of GDP. This past January, as the Trump Administration’s ICE arrests in Minnesota brought global opprobrium, Sánchez publicized a plan to give amnesty to half a million migrants. And he has been prominent among the critics of Trump’s Iranian misadventure, even refusing the United States the use of Spanish air bases at Rota and Morón for refueling and repairs. Much of the Spanish establishment has been urging Sánchez to conduct his foreign policy in a more bipartisan way, but as the former foreign minister Alfonso Dastis recently told the Madrid daily El Mundo, “the problem is that he views everything through the lens of heightening the contrast with Trump.”

In most foreign capitals, Sánchez’s strategy has been a smashing success. The Berliner Zeitung calls Sánchez the “leader of the global left”; for the French business magazine Challenges, he is the “champion of the anti-Trump resistance.” The revelation by Reuters in late April that one Pentagon official had proposed suspending Spain from NATO was another feather in Sánchez’s cap. Global public opinion is increasingly inclined to judge Sánchez against Trump, and the verdict has favored Sánchez.

Except, perhaps, in Spain itself. There, the international hero is viewed by a large part of his electorate as a disgrace. He is jeered when he appears in public. People throw mud at him, and three of his longtime advisors have been sent to jail. His PSOE keeps losing regional elections by historic margins—in Extremadura last December, in Aragon in February, and in its historic stronghold of Andalucía in mid-May. He is not term-limited, but he must call an election by August 2027, and his prospects of being re-elected appear vanishingly small. Sánchez, who for a decade now has shown a Houdini-like ability to escape from political disaster, is counting on Trump’s reputational toxicity to rescue him from this one. But for the moment it doesn’t look like that is going to happen—in fact, nationalists are surging in Spain, and new criminal investigations involving socialist influence peddling and slander of judges have left Sánchez fighting for his political life.

Sánchez’s Bag of Tricks

A politician who stays in power when he is at odds with the times must have a gift. Sánchez knows Spanish society well—its generations-old resentments, its class anxieties, its vanities—and deploys that knowledge with agility. He was president of the PSOE in 2016 when a disappointing election left it facing an unpalatable choice. After four months of deadlocked negotiations, Sánchez’s socialist colleagues were pressuring him to enter a coalition with the conservative People’s Party (PP), which, under its lackluster premier Mariano Rajoy, had fallen just short of a majority.

Why do that? Why compromise with the party’s arch-rivals? Because not doing it was likely to produce elections in which the socialists would do even worse. The public had been clamoring for a more radical politics ever since the finance crisis of 2008-09 and the currency crisis that followed. Spain had a new party called Podemos, which is Spanish for “Yes, We Can.” (It was the Obama era.) Podemos wanted even bolder economic redistribution than the socialists did, along with new kinds of identity politics. Now it was breathing down the PSOE’s neck, running just two points behind them in the polls and with nearly as large a parliamentary delegation. If the PSOE did not join with the PP, new elections might have to be called, risking a defeat that would sweep them into the dustbin of progressive history. Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’s leader, described what was going on as a passing of the torch. Rather than fend off Podemos by pretending to be a centrist, Sánchez resigned. With three advisors, he drove around Spain for several months, putting 20,000 miles on their battered Peugeot. That trip is now the stuff of socialist legend. While their colleagues back in Madrid bore the responsibility for having compromised, Sánchez and his team went directly to Podemos’s base and made it their own. In the process, they built a new political machine with the help of the hardball political activists of Spain’s small cities. Within a decade, several of Sánchez’s traveling companions would be in jail.

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