His opponents accuse him of subverting the constitution
Publicado en The Economist, el 3 de octubre de 2024
“We will move forward determinedly…with or without the help of the legislature,” Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, told a meeting of his Socialist Party earlier last month. To his more excitable critics, this sounded like a declaration of dictatorship. In fact, it was a recognition of his embattled circumstances. In office since 2018, Mr Sánchez is the great survivor of European politics, a wily and ruthless tactician. But his minority coalition government rules at the pleasure of Catalan and Basque radical nationalists, and at a growing cost to the quality of Spain’s democracy and its institutions.
After the left took a drubbing in local elections, Mr Sánchez called a snap national poll in July 2023. The mainstream conservative People’s Party (PP) won, but even with the support of Vox, a hard-right outfit, fell six short of a majority of the 350 seats in parliament. Rejecting the broad coalition with the PP that many voters preferred, Mr Sánchez instead decided to carry on by stitching together the backing of eight assorted parties.
One of those was Junts, the party of Carles Puigdemont, a former Catalan regional president who has been a fugitive from justice since an illegal bid to break away from Spain in 2017. His price was an amnesty for all those involved in the independence bid. Mr Sánchez had always opposed this. But he complied, ramming it through parliament by five votes.
Now he is poised to offer another concession to Catalan nationalism. In return for securing the installation of Salvador Illa, a Socialist, as the regional president in Barcelona, Mr Sánchez promised Esquerra, another separatist party, what amounts to fiscal sovereignty for Catalonia, one of Spain’s richest regions. As with the amnesty, this is a “constitutional reform through the back door”, as a sceptical former Socialist minister puts it. Since it means less money for the common pot, it has aroused more grumbling than the amnesty.
The amnesty is the only important measure the government has got through parliament in its ten months in office. It failed to win approval for this year’s budget and is unlikely to do so for next year. To make matters worse, Begoña Gómez, the prime minister’s wife, is being investigated by a judge. She denies wrongdoing, and Mr Sánchez claims she is a victim of political persecution. But many question how she obtained university posts for which she is not obviously qualified. In a seemingly ill-advised step, she signed a letter of support for a friend bidding for a government contract. When this scandal broke, rather than apologise, Mr Sánchez blamed the “far right” and said he was considering whether political life was worth it. He subjected Spaniards to a five day “period of reflection”, only to resume work.
None of this means he is in imminent danger. Unseating a Spanish prime minister requires assembling a parliamentary majority for an alternative, a harder challenge than just winning a no-confidence vote in parliament, as is the case in many other countries. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP’s leader, recently told El Mundo, a newspaper, that a censure motion was “as essential as it is impossible”. Although some senior Socialists privately express disquiet with the concessions to separatists, only a couple do so in public. Mr Sánchez has an iron grip on his party which resembles a fan club, says one member.
The prime minister can point to achievements. Since 2018 he has boosted the minimum wage and cut the abuse of temporary contracts without hurting employment, which is growing fast. He has expanded vocational training. After suffering worse than its neighbours in the pandemic, the economy has grown at more than double the euro-zone average since 2023. Some of the growth comes from a post-pandemic boom in tourism, which shows signs of faltering, and some from the EU’s covid-recovery fund, which runs out in 2026, and from an expansionary fiscal policy that cannot last. But Spain has strengths that point to resilience, as Ignacio de la Torre of Arcano, an asset manager, notes: it has a relatively high savings rate and a healthy current account surplus, boosted by growing exports of services, such as data management and engineering consultancy.
Mr Sánchez’s biggest asset is an ineffective and divided opposition. Mr Feijóo, formerly a successful regional president in Galicia, has struggled on the national stage. Although Vox is slowly declining, the PP’s potential dependence on its parliamentary votes means that other parties shun it. A new nativist outfit, propagated by social media and called The Party’s Over grabbed 4.6% of the vote in June’s election for the European Parliament.
Many in Madrid think Mr Sánchez can last out a full term until 2027. But the lack of a budget may narrow his options. If the right remains split three ways and with the economy strong, he may be tempted to call an election next summer, thinks Cristina Monge, a political scientist.
His dependence on Catalan and Basque nationalists carries a cost. “Sánchez has broken an unwritten rule that you couldn’t become prime minister with the votes of parties that don’t believe in the stability and governability of the country,” says Borja Sémper, the PP’s spokesman. Mr Sánchez’s abrupt U-turns on matters of state purely in order to remain in office have contributed to entrenched public cynicism about Spanish democracy.
He claims to have ended separatist agitation in Catalonia. Certainly, his pardoning in 2021 of nationalist leaders jailed for the breakaway bid was sensible. But he has gone further than many observers think wise. He has weakened the penal code: in documents signed with Junts and Esquerra, his party endorsed the nationalist narrative of recent history. The sweeping nature of the amnesty (which applies to rioters as well as politicians) and its narrow approval without much public debate flew in the face of the recommendations of the Venice Commission, a European consultative body on the rule of law. It still faces various legal challenges.
Mr Sánchez has also placed political appointees in supposedly independent jobs, such as in the Constitutional Tribunal and the Bank of Spain. He has instructed the state lawyer to sue the judge investigating his wife. “Traditionally Spain has suffered from some weaknesses in checks and balances,” says Elisa de la Nuez, a campaigner for the rule of law. “In recent years that has got much worse.”
The prime minister did not invent the political fragmentation that makes the country so hard to govern. He could argue that he is adapting the political system to changed realities, especially in Catalonia. Others see a shift towards an ill-defined confederation, and tactical tinkering while the country drifts.