“Haz que pase”: Pedro Sanchez and the exception to the slow death of Western social democracy

We are alarmed, we are all alarmed. Even Francis Fukuyama, who once declared that the neoliberal consensus symbolised the end of history, has refined his beliefs in the face of identity politics and the populist wave. The commentariat as it exists today is happy to decry what it sees as the end of common sense politics, relenting to extremism, the end of a nebulous representative democracy. Of course, this has yet to come to pass, but it’s a tangible fear nonetheless. Today I want to explain why Spain’s Pedro Sanchez is the most brazen exception: why he holds high the torch of social democracy, currently the proudest branch of the Reformist tradition, in the face of increasing political hardship. I want to establish through a brief analysis whether there’s something special about Spain, or whether it’s all down to Sanchez himself, complete with wily consultants and remarkable jawline.

Pedro Sanchez has been the Prime Minister of Spain since 2018, when a moción de censura (vote of no confidence) pushed out the former and now discredited leader of the centre-right PP, Mariano Rajoy. Sanchez’s centre-left party, the Socialists (PSOE), took power in his absence, commanding a minority government with barely enough support from the left populists in Podemos and a range of nationalist groups to ensure stable government continued. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last: a rejection of Sanchez’s budget by the right wing elements in his loose coalition forced him into a press conference where he called fresh elections. While this has stopped parties to the PSOE’s right from claiming they are simply “occupying” the Palace of Moncloa, it poses a distinctly larger problem for Sanchez: he has to figure out how to win an election. For a centre-left politician drawing heavily from the Spanish equivalents of Blair and Wilson, it doesn’t look easy. But there are a slew of reasons for Sanchez to be confident.

First, the PSOE did abysmally at the previous elections in 2016. They won only 85 out of 350 seats, 5 down on their 2015 result, and only 15 shy of Podemos’ result, their only rivals on the left at that election. That sounds awful, because it was. At that point, the PSOE’s political programme was far less clear, in part because there was no obvious mandate for change; it appeared that most were happy with the PP and Rajoy, along with their status quo politics. Now, there’s space for a bout of proper social democracy. Sanchez can proffer extended social care, a raised minimum wage, and a huge public service boost, and be able to sell it in a way that was impossible before. Because 2016’s result was so bad, the 130 seats Sanchez is currently expecting can be billed as a huge success even if he doesn’t win a majority, and it can be billed as a success for social democratic policies in particular. But how exactly are they being sold?

That’s the second point. Sanchez now has a great campaign team that have been working hard to position him on the right side of every issue. His feminist cabinet took commentators inside Spain and without by storm, and his eagerness to work with political entities that had been side-lined for so long – not just Podemos, but Catalan nationalists – has made him stand out. Some are even claiming that this mediation with Spain’s “independentists” was designed to bring about an election: an election where the centre-right parties would start to look more extreme and the PSOE would come out the victor. That’s some boastful posturing, but it’s the same stuff that pulled off the only successful motion of no confidence in Spanish democratic history, so who knows?

In fact, Sanchez’s strategists’ theory that the right wing would suffer at election seems to be coming true. While the three right wing political forces in Spain (the more centrist Ciudadanos, the stalwart PP, and the new populist far-right Vox) poll higher than the PSOE and Podemos combined, they have aligned together, putting the supposedly “liberal” Ciudadanos on the same podium as out-and-proud facha (fascist) Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox and general jeb-end. Teaming up with Vox, especially in order to hold a distinctly under-rated Big Society-esque protest in the centre of Madrid, isn’t a good look for the established right of Spanish politics. Spanish voters are, on average, more likely to slide left than in other European countries, and Sanchez’s work to stigmatise the right will only draw more voters to his side as time draws on.

Sanchez’s national rivals on the right have enabled a strategy of “divide and conquer”: meanwhile, on the left, Podemos is conquering itself. The guiding lights of the left populist movement have fled at a rate of knots, creating a party that appears ever more the cult of personality around Pablo Iglesias, having spent years claiming to be the opposite. A slew of pseudo-horizontalist political structures have created an organisation with thousands of members but policy-making that happens overwhelmingly at the top. The sense that Podemos has become a party with “drama” has seen voters flock back to their former flame, the PSOE, in its new social democratic garb. In sum, the PSOE’s election campaign is an effort to promote their new politics while doing down all the other options. In fairness, that's what all election campaigns pare down to; but in this case, Sanchez is right on all accounts. The PSOE has changed for the better, and the other parties are in a tizzy. It’s making sure that the floating voters see the same story that will seal the deal.

Sanchez has been pursuing the social democratic ideal for his first year in office with mixed success, in part thanks to a struggle to pass any legislation without a clear majority in the Spanish Congress. One of the strongest parts of his campaign is his charisma, of which his insistence on completing the PSOE’s regime of change is no small part. They even threw it into their election slogan: haz que pase, “make it happen”. On the campaign trail, Sanchez exudes assertiveness, confidence in the face of hardship. But perhaps the man could put it better himself: “It might sound brazen, but I’ve noticed that I thrive in difficult situations”. That difficult situation doesn’t just belong to Spain, but all Europe's progressives with it: we can only hope that Sanchez walks out of this election as the exception that proves the rule.