Spain’s socialist leader has defied expectations. Are there lessons for Starmer?
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Pedro Sánchez has remained a rare bulwark of social democracy in an increasingly right-leaning continent. As Labour’s electoral honeymoon slips into distant-memory territory and Keir Starmer attempts to reboot his premiership, the party and its leader might find a southward glance instructive.
![[A defaced portrait of Sanchez on a bus during a protest in Madrid.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cf85516e7ba877eede3f3a68ad18a919b82aa7f7/0_163_4896_2938/master/4896.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
For the past six years, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has defied expectations by remaining in power during some of the most turbulent times in recent Spanish and European history, making it a rare bulwark of social democracy in an increasingly right-leaning continent.
What’s more, as the Economist recently noted, Spain now looks to be the best-performing rich-world economy of 2024, according to measures such as GDP growth, unemployment and the performance of the stock market. The key to the socialists’ unlikely longevity in government is their leader, who is justifiably known as the great survivor of Spanish politics. After being defenestrated by his party in 2016, Sánchez returned as leader the following year and, in 2018, became prime minister after using an audacious vote of no-confidence to topple the scandal-mired conservative government of his People’s party (PP) predecessor, Mariano Rajoy. Not for nothing did he call his 2019 memoir Manual de resistencia (Resistance Manual).
Since then, Sánchez has seen off another PP leader, watched the rapid death of the centre-right Citizens party, the equally rapid growth of the far-right Vox party, and the slow decline of his erstwhile partners in Podemos, which sprang from the anti-austerity indignados movement.
