It seems Pedro Sánchez wants to paint July’s elections as a referendum on the rise of the hard right. Will his gamble pay off?
is no stranger to comebacks: ejected as leader of his Socialist party in 2016, he toured the country to build support and regain control the next year. And he is no rookie gambler; a motion of no confidence he called as leader of the opposition, in 2018, installed him as a surprise prime minister. Nor is he a bad political horse-wrangler: after elections in 2019, he pulled together an awkward minority government with the radical-left Podemos that has held together since.
All these qualities are now on display as Mr Sánchez makes another gamble. On May 29th he announced snap elections for July 23rd, after his party suffered a brutal defeat in regional and municipal elections a day earlier. The conservative opposition People’s Party not only won the regions of Valencia and Aragón .
But Mr Sánchez has his own problems. His coalition partner, Podemos, was pummelled. Now the parties to the left of the Socialists must reorganise themselves quickly. Yolanda Díaz, Spain’s labour minister and a deputy prime minister, has allied with Podemos in the past, but now leads a new formation called Sumar.
After the weekend’s elections, the momentum is solidly with the right. Mr Sánchez has little time to discover another talent: that of a general rewriting his strategy while already busy fighting. He has given himself only eight weeks to do it.
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