Western liberals and conservatives alike diligently dump domestic commitments on welfare, equality, and the environment alongside international commitments on development aid and the rule of law.
A nihilistic nationalism without nation-building, its emptiness masked by vows of rearmament and attacks on migration, is the order du jour.
Yet all rules have exceptions, and today’s leadership exception sits on the Iberian Peninsula.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has led a government concerned with public service provision, housing, labour conditions, a compromise approach to migration, progressive action on climate change and a liberal approach to international relations.
Sanchez leans centrist but is willing to work with the left and governs in coalition with Sumar, the successor platform to erstwhile Podemos, the most effective of the crop of post-financial-crisis European left-populist formations.
In short, Sánchez is a specimen of a species that has withered to near-extinction: the European social democrat.
This is particularly apparent in the Spanish government’s huge divergence over migration. Its immigration policies are fundamentally about economic stabilisation. However, Spain’s willingness to accept the reality of movement is remarkable when compared to the European Commission’s race to mimic Washington’s deportation drive.
In Spain, as elsewhere, we have seen horrifically exploitative conditions (especially among agricultural and domestic migrant workers) combined with populist agitation blending labour competition concerns with racism.
Contrary to the new right’s claims, migration routes into Europe became more, not less, closed between the 1990s and 2010s. What flexibility in migration remains is a function of capitalist demand for labour, not liberal-left largesse.
But, where Britain’s Keir Starmer responded to race riots with anti-migrant measures, Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz responded to similar provocations by doubling down on her government’s landmark plan to regularise 500,000 undocumented workers.
Spain is hardly a beacon of openness; it is supporting and encouraging Mauritania and Senegal to prevent migration from North Africa despite extensive evidence of systematic violence against people on the move in those countries. The Atlantic route to the Canary Islands has at times overtaken the Central Mediterranean as the world’s highest-casualty migration journey.
This is the same Spanish government that, in 2022, after a massacre of people crossing to its North African exclave of Melilla, praised the behaviour of its security forces and oversaw a NATO conference that listed irregular migration as a “threat”.
And yet, Spain is now singing a new and progressive tune, virtually uniquely among Western states – a dynamic repeated in its willingness to take rhetorical stands against prevailing winds on multiple connected issues; against rearmament, the whittling down of digital rights, development aid cuts, labour exploitation, and climate retreat.
One might put this difference down to recent Spanish history. A country whose boomer generation grew up under a fascist dictatorship will likely be less blasé about current threats to democracy.
Others have pointed to public opinion. For instance, Spanish voters’ stridently pro-Palestinian views and powerful movements doubtless played a role in its government being a European outlier in its clear opposition to genocide in Gaza.
And yet social democrats elsewhere have paid little heed to public opinion or levels of organisation on key political questions, and Spain’s Socialist party, the PSOE, faces the same gamut of threats as its counterparts. It is dealing with a resurgent far right, deepening centrifugal pressures, and a profound lack of public trust in its politicians (and politicians in general).
Nor does Spain’s government have ample political capital to spare for controversy. Sanchez’ administration spent much of last year mired in a series of far-reaching corruption scandals implicating senior officials, and a brace of high-profile harassment cases to boot, resulting in international outlets calling for the premier’s head.
Things remain on a knife-edge, with the far-right Vox doubling its vote at the government’s expense in recent regional elections.
Liberal governments’ stock response to such pressures is to retreat, treating their position as defensive and any suggestion of radicalism as electoral suicide. The extreme caution shown by figures such as Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz, in the face of Reform and Alternative für Deutschland, is an unedifying inverse of the populist right’s response to pressure: constant and unrelenting attack.
The Sánchez government chose a different path. With enemies framing it as venal, it chose to make the battle lines political rather than personal, demanding to be judged by its principles above all else. Against conventional wisdom that progressives must carefully mask radical impulses, Spain’s Socialists have deliberately positioned themselves as more radical than they actually are.
Perhaps they are genuine technocrats who have heeded the expanding corpus of evidence that rightward shifts do not help social democrats win elections. (The Socialists’ position may still be fragile, but it is less existential than, say, that of Starmer.)
Entering government in 2022, Spain’s Socialists may have avoided many of their contemporaries’ superficial analysis: that Trump’s defeat and the pandemic had augured the return of neoliberal normality.
Instead, perhaps they recognised that the populist right had seized a first-mover advantage by identifying and exploiting the fault lines of a changing world, and that, to survive, they must follow suit.
Such a political technologist’s account of the Spanish exception bears some merit. But it accounts for the domestic more than international nature of the Sánchez project. The prime minister’s op-ed defending the migrant regularisation was in The New York Times, for example, not in Spanish-language newspapers like El País.
Sánchez’s article was framed as a direct riposte to Trump: “Some leaders have chosen to hunt [immigrants] down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel. My government has chosen a different way.”
Madrid followed immediately with incursions on US tech giants, causing Elon Musk to attack “Dirty Sánchez” as a “fascist totalitarian”; something that the prime minister’s comms operation likely had predicted and embraced.
Overnight, Spain became internationally synonymous with resistance to Trumpism.
What, on the surface, appears to be a savvy defence of the last holdout of an old form of European social democracy might also be seen as the birth of a new one. In Europe, whilst EU officials panic over the apparent disintegration of the Western alliance, Spain has taken the lead on cementing trading relationships with Latin America.
Within the European institutions, Commission Vice-President Teresa Ribera is fighting tooth and nail to retain and extend Brussels’ climate commitments.
Spain has stood apart in vocally refusing international pressure to increase military spending at the expense of its welfare state. Perhaps Spanish centrists learned a lesson that other peripheral European countries, immiserated by EU austerity measures, did not: overcoming Franco-German dominance means having a clear alternative project.
That alternative has a rationality to it beyond ideology, domestic politics, or geopolitics. Spain is not well positioned to reap the financial rewards of massive remilitarisation as Germany or the US might be. Its post-eurozone crisis economic recovery has vindicated wage minima, strategic investment, welfarism, and the reduction of insecure work.
And above all, Spain’s next decades will be determined by how it handles an extremely fragile environmental position.
2024 saw historic floods around Valencia driven by Atlantic warming that also caused a major crisis for the government. The government had to learn that dire climatic conditions do not automatically lead to support for climate action; urgency had to be communicated.
Sánchez invested in renewables but led with a call for an adaptation pact, framing climate action as an emergency measure to prevent national loss of life now, rather than a long-term shift. Spain, at the Mediterranean and Atlantic’s pivot point, is staring down the barrel of the century’s crisis, and its leaders have noticed.
Climate change impacts will also exacerbate problems on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, leading to vicious downward spirals across the region if left unchecked.
At the end of 2025, a Mediterranean Manifesto was released by civil society groups from across the region who had gathered in Barcelona. It went beyond the government’s position, drawing clear regional links between unequal wealth distribution, the extraction of African resources by European capital, violence at borders, weak human rights, the Gaza genocide, remilitarisation, biodiversity loss and climate collapse.
Faced with these interconnected crises, the manifesto argued for a coordinated policy response: empowering civil society, strategic investment, taxing wealth, facilitating safe migration, defending communities against climate impacts, holding human rights violators accountable, and peacebuilding.
The Spanish government has taken some steps in this ambitious direction, thereby positioning Madrid as the anti-Washington. Whether it will continue to build on this, and whether doing so is tenable and sustainable, time will tell.
However, Spain will not be the first, or the last place where strategic alternatives – sometimes in unlikely places – will emerge to the West’s descent into nationalism and nihilism.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
