Ekaitz Cancela in The Ideas Letter:
European social democracy is undergoing its deepest existential crisis in decades. The French Socialist Party is moribund. Keir Starmer’s Labour, despite its landslide victory in 2024, would now be defeated by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The far right governs in Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, and stands as the leading opposition force in Germany, France, Austria, and Portugal, where the far-right Chega party has become the country’s second-largest political force, burying the legacy of António Costa, now President of the European Council. Spain remains the sole holdout where European social democracy survives—and it does so in the improbable figure of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
In a moment of accelerating systemic turbulence—compounded by the digital and green revolutions, a war economy, the crisis of the unipolar order, and the fracturing of the welfare state—national specificities are increasingly decisive in shaping political outcomes. The national consensus forged by Sanchismo is a product of this tension. His public image is thoroughly degraded at home, sustained only by the international reputation he earns as the antithesis of the far-right—a contrast his parliamentary adversaries have learned to exploit with increasing effectiveness.
The political career of Sánchez reads like a Hollywood script. From his appointment as general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in 2014, his ascent was meteoric. He ran as the party’s candidate for prime minister in December 2015 and again in June 2016. After 609 days without an approved national budget, faced with the choice of abstaining to allow another government under Mariano Rajoy or pursuing an alternative, Sánchez refused to facilitate the investiture. He clashed with the party and resigned his seat in parliament.
A year later, in June 2017, Sánchez returned to lead the PSOE—lifted by the rank and file, reborn as a hero. “I’m not dead, I’m right here,” he declared in an interview on the country’s most popular political program, shot in a burger joint near La Moncloa, Spain’s seat of government. Sánchez presented himself to the public as the prophet of a creed with an “active” worldview—one that acts upon an atomized people to organize their collective will.
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