The architect of a career full of unexpected turns, the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, surprised again this Monday by announcing the advancement of the legislative elections after the disaster of his party in the municipal and regional elections.
Weakened by five intense years in power, marked by the crisis of the covid pandemic and the economic turmoil linked to the war in Ukraine, this 51-year-old socialist surprised the whole world by calling general elections for July 23more than four months ahead of schedule.
A bet that may seem risky considering the poor results obtained on Sunday by Sánchez’s Socialists and his partners during the municipal and regional elections, although consistent with the strategy that this trained economist has always opted for.
“The alternative was six months of bleeding from the government,” observes Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, before which he has opted to “play it all out for everything”. “Pedro Sánchez is typical,” he says.
After this decision, “there is a strategic calculation”, since the Socialists can still “maintain at a correct level” until July, and “if they held out for four months it would have been worse”, completes Paloma Román, from the Complutense University of Madrid.
– Stubborn –
For Sánchez, who went from being an almost unknown young politician to taking over the reins of the oldest party in Spain in 2014 -and president of the government four years later- it’s an unexpected new twist in a career that’s been a roller coaster.
Born on February 29, 1972 into a wealthy family, Sánchez, a basketball player in his youth and a graduate in Economics, was left for dead politically after having reaped in 2015 and 2016 the worst results of the Socialist Party in its modern era.
An internal rebellion ousted him, but six months later he was back thanks to the militants, after winning a primary in which he toured Spain with his own car.
And, supported by his already famous tenacity, in June 2018 he made history again: with the support of the radical left of Podemos and Catalan and Basque nationalists, he led the first successful motion of censure in a democracy and removed the conservative Mariano Rajoy from power. , sunk by a corruption scandal in his party.
“He is a politician who habitually makes these kinds of decisions,” stresses Oriol Bartomeus. “So far it has worked (…) What happens is that now things are more complicated: part of a less favorable situation”, he adds.
– International profile –
In the Socialist Party since he was a teenager, Sánchez has had to do a tightrope walk to stay in power these last five years.
Its fragile parliamentary majority, nicknamed “Frankenstein” by his detractors due to his heterodoxy, broke out in February 2019 and forced him to call elections, which had to be repeated a few months later due to the lack of sufficient support to form a government.
Forced to agree at the beginning of 2020 with his rivals on the left, We can, when a few months before he said that he could not sleep peacefully In case of sharing a government with them, from then on he promoted a package of clearly leftist reforms.
Sánchez, who caused a sensation by appointing the cabinet with the most women in the country’s history, increased the minimum wage by a third in five years and managed to approve a labor reform aimed at combating precarious contracts.
Having come to power after the failed attempt for independence in Catalonia in 2017, he began a dialogue with the pro-independence supporters to whom he made concessions, considered unacceptable by the right-wing opposition.
It also obtained the green light for a law to compensate the memory of the victims of the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), whose remains were exhumed from a pharaonic mausoleum on the outskirts of Madrid where they rested.
Always impeccably dressed, fluent in English and French, something not entirely usual in other Spanish politicians, this former member of the cabinet of the high representative of the UN in Bosnia and president of the Socialist International since last year, managed to give Spain greater visibility in the European arena.