Pedro Sánchez fights for his political life

The foundations for Pedro Sánchez's rise to the pinnacle of left-wing EU politics were laid with his 1.90-meter frame hunched over in a Peugeot 407. It was 2016, and the future Spanish prime minister was traveling around the country in his small car, sounding out the electorate and paving his way to power.

But that tour a decade ago also planted the seeds for the worst crisis of his term.

Corruption allegations against his inner circle have discredited him at home , while his resistance to US demands for increased military spending , driven by loyalty to his voters, has undermined his reputation abroad.

At the time of his road trip, Sánchez was forging ties with two future right-hand men who were urging him to regain the leadership of the Socialist Party.

"We were creating a very special connection," he wrote about them in his 2019 memoir. He also had a third aide nearby who slept in a party office one night to guard a ballot box that would help give Sánchez the reins of the party.

Those same three men— Santos Cerdán, former minister José Luís Ábalos, and Koldo García —are now at the center of a growing scandal over allegations that they took bribes from companies in exchange for public construction contracts.

All three deny any wrongdoing. However, the Socialist Party has expelled them, calling them a "toxic triangle."

Cerdán, who was the third-ranking official in the party hierarchy, has been in pretrial detention since last week . Sánchez's allies claim he never got into the car with the three, but their closeness is beyond dispute. The opposition Popular Party (PP) has dubbed them the "Peugeot gang."

Sánchez has said he knew nothing of the alleged crimes and apologized to the Spanish people , but has rejected his critics' demands for early elections , insisting the next ones will go ahead as planned in 2027.

Ironically, it was the systemic corruption of the right-wing PP government at the time that allowed him to oust his predecessor, Mariano Rajoy. On the day Rajoy was ousted in a vote of no confidence in 2018, Sánchez called corruption a "chronic disease" that constituted "the true threat to the political and institutional stability of our country."

On Wednesday, Sánchez told Parliament that his government had introduced more than 30 anti-corruption measures in the last seven years , but that it was "clear" that more needed to be done . He announced a new "state plan to fight corruption."

However, opposition leaders, the EU, and political analysts have expressed concern about corruption in Spain and the way the Sánchez government is handling the situation.

On Tuesday, the European Commission noted that Spain was legally required to adopt an anti-corruption strategy , but that work on it "had not yet begun."

Alberto Núñez Feijóo , leader of the People's Party (PP), stated that Sánchez "didn't come [to power] to clean up anything. He came to dirty everything."

Referring to the alleged irregularities in the awarding of construction contracts, José Ignacio Torreblanca, senior advisor at the European Council on Foreign Relations , said: "We were very surprised to see that it is still relatively easy to manipulate a public contract simply by filling public works commissions with politically appointed personnel."

"This is very worrying," Torreblanca adds. "Politics tends to over-colonize the administration."

The scandal involving Cerdán erupted just before Sánchez's biggest international test: a NATO summit last month aimed at appeasing US President Donald Trump by boosting European defense spending.

As a Spanish prime minister with good English and a certain arrogance—and a leader not defined by financial crises like the previous two— Sánchez had so far managed to raise Spain's global profile.

But at the NATO summit , he undid much of that work, highlighting Spain's refusal to accept what he called the "unreasonable" target of spending 5% of GDP on defense. In return, Trump threatened to retaliate against him for seeking to "take advantage."

Sánchez appealed in part to the anti-militarism and anti-Trumpism of his base in Spain , as well as to the radical left of his fragile parliamentary alliance.

"Other leaders know he's in trouble in his own country and that their reactions are driven by that rather than by improving the EU or NATO," explains Carlos Miranda, former Spanish ambassador to NATO.

But Sánchez, like some of his predecessors, did not even attempt to convince the Spanish public to support increased military spending.

"No Spanish politician has had the courage to say: 'Look, we have to spend even more. The Poles and Romanians are our friends and we have to show solidarity with them,'" Miranda points out.

A government official responded that Sánchez's position was not based on expediency, but on his deep-rooted pacifist beliefs: in 2014, he stated that the Spanish Ministry of Defense "was beyond what was needed."

Another weakness of Sánchez, both at home and abroad, is that he has become entangled in the controversial issue of Catalan separatism.

Ahead of the 2023 general election, he preached healing from the trauma of the failed Catalan independence bid, stating that while he believed in a diverse and decentralized country, there would be no amnesty for separatists convicted of the 2017 secession attempt.

After the elections, everything changed, because the only way Sánchez could achieve a parliamentary majority and form a government was with the votes of the most radical separatist party, which left him subservient to the demands of its leader, Carles Puigdemont.

The first demand was an amnesty law, which Sánchez granted, claiming he was "making a virtue out of necessity." The agreement, which outraged the right, was negotiated by one of the president's old friends: Cerdán.

Puigdemont now wants Catalan recognized as an official language of the EU, but Madrid's attempts to pressure other member states to accept it have fueled discontent in Brussels.

Catalan pride , even among the region's Socialists, also explains why Sánchez has intervened in a major bank takeover bid. His government has imposed a three-year ban on the merger of BBVA with the Catalan bank Sabadell , a ban that contradicts EU efforts to promote bank consolidation .

Juan Luis Manfredi, a professor of foreign policy at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, complains: "The Prime Minister brings his own problems to Brussels to resolve his differences with the [Catalan] nationalists, but these problems do not contribute to a more cohesive Europe."

Even so, Puigdemont's party remains dissatisfied. This leaves Sánchez paralyzed in Parliament, unable to pass a budget or any major law. His Western allies, meanwhile, feel snubbed. And his popular support continues to waver in the face of the growing stench of corruption.

Santiago Abascal , leader of the far-right Vox party, said Wednesday that the entire "Peugeot mafia" was destined to be tried, right down to the "number one."

A hurt Sánchez declared himself a "clean politician," but added: "I know that in these cases it's harder to believe me than to doubt me." He seemed very different from the ambitious optimist who embarked on that tour of Spain in 2016.

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