A Handsome Quixote
In Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish establishment seeks a futile renewal
In a self-help book, I once read that a leader is a man who, when he wants something, gets up and goes after it. Pedro Sánchez is something like that: a handsome, telegenic man with a quixotic self-confidence based on an intuition deeper than mere luck. If Spain did not have such an uneasy relationship with its own history, Sánchez’s intuition might have unfolded in a less superficial way. Or perhaps it would simply have been eclipsed by better-educated politicians of his generation — men who were also more insecure, either because they were perfectionists or easily spooked.
The son of a well-to-do Madrid family that read newspapers and sent its children to the right schools, Sánchez joined the PSOE at twenty-one. By twenty-six he was already saying he would become secretary-general of the party and prime minister of Spain. At the time only his friends admired him, mostly because he was good-looking and, whenever he set his sights on a woman, he seduced her with unfailing ease. His Prince Charming looks and his success with women must have reinforced his aplomb, just as much as the complacency of the Madrid left that shaped his formative years.
Before committing to the PSOE in 1993, Sánchez gave up basketball, aware that he would never be a brilliant player and that — tall as he was — he was simply too handsome to stand out in such a bruising sport. Throughout his career there has been a constant effort to fill his image with substance. If anything has brought him trouble, it has been his inability to adapt to the decorative roles Madrid had reserved for him. While others adapted or broke under pressure, Sánchez found in the hostility of the establishment a reason to push forward.
When Sánchez entered politics, the idea that the PSOE stood on the right side of history — that the socialists were the good guys — was already beginning to crack. The ghosts of Francoism were fading, corruption inside the PSOE was emerging, and the Spanish right was reclaiming its place in democratic politics. Sánchez first obtained a grant to work with the Socialist group in Brussels, despite his shaky English. Later, in 1998, he managed to join a peace mission to Bosnia led by a former minister of Felipe González, just after the party had lost power (González remains Spain’s longest-serving elected prime minister).
In 2000, when José María Aznar was touring Europe lecturing his peers, Sánchez entered the party apparatus. He did so through José Blanco, the strongman of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the future prime minister who would promote the reform of Catalonia’s self-government to lead his party out of the political wilderness. Unlike other figures who would later become part of his team, Sánchez advanced slowly and awkwardly under Zapatero. In 2003 he ran in the Madrid municipal elections and narrowly missed entering the council. In 2008 and again in 2011 he appeared on the PSOE list for parliament and once more fell just short.
After briefly entering parliament in 2010 to fill a vacated seat, Sánchez won the award the press corps gives each year to the most promising new MP. Even so, he continued to be regarded as the ugly duckling of the Socialist group. Blanco, the party’s organisational secretary, assigned him the most thankless tasks and, in 2011, when the Popular Party had returned to government and everyone assumed Sánchez would give up, he began writing a doctoral thesis on Spanish diplomacy. Spain was teetering on the edge of a European bailout, Catalan separatism was growing rapidly, and the Barcelona left — allied to the PSOE since the Transition — was beginning to accept the idea of Catalan self-determination. Zapatero had fallen into total disrepute after swelling the debt of a country the PP had left with a budget surplus.
The thesis, which he completed in record time — eighteen months — received a cum laude distinction, but specialists later tore it apart. The fragments that circulated when he became leader of the PSOE were astonishingly banal. They reinforced his image as an insubstantial man, hoisted up to varnish the Spanish regime at a difficult moment. Sánchez had written the thesis with the idea of turning to teaching while waiting for his fortunes in the party to improve, but he soon began combining his doctorate with growing political responsibilities. The credential, in any case, gave him an academic sheen that helped him stand up to the rivals of his generation, all laden with degrees and top-of-the-class attitudes.
The first real turning point in Sánchez’s career came in 2014, when Catalan separatism began to look capable of imposing its programme. Scotland was about to hold a referendum on self-determination. Catalonia had shifted the axis of political debate by staging grassroots consultations in towns and cities across the country. The regional government had called an unofficial referendum for 9 November that year, to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was all a sham, a trick to preserve the political system and keep the real independence forces at bay. At the time, however, few Catalans — let alone Castilians — could see it.
To combat separatism, Madrid was promoting new faces, and Sánchez sensed an opening. Adopting the grassroots style of the independence movement, he drove more than 40,000 kilometres in his Peugeot 407 to make himself known among party members. At the height of the craze for fresh faces, he became secretary-general of the PSOE in July 2014. Dressed in jeans and a white shirt, he looked on the day of his victory as though he had just stepped out of a Miami swimming pool, and he announced the beginning of the end of the Spanish right — the historic enemy of Catalan nationalism.
At first, the PSOE’s sacred cows let him have his head while calling him el guapito (the pretty boy). The young politicians who had emerged to contain Catalonia with talk of democratic renewal looked at him with condescension. Pablo Iglesias and Albert Rivera, to name just two, seemed more intelligent and better placed. Compared with Podemos and Ciudadanos, the major new parties, the PSOE was flat-footed. Sánchez was alone. He may have been a free spirit within the system, but he looked like an Adolfo Suárez backed more by marketing than by dictatorship. His attempts to compete with the rivals of his own generation soon showed him that the democratic ideals he had grown up with were a lie. His mentors in the party did not want him to fight, only to play a part.
Spain wanted to feel as new and democratic as the independence movement, but without changing a thing, and Sánchez began his race to the Moncloa as just another puppet of the 1978 regime. Unlike his rivals, Sánchez could wrap himself in the Spanish flag without coming across as a fascist in Catalonia or making his own supporters uneasy. Perhaps that is why all the young figures the State had hoisted up were singed by the 2017 referendum. As the persecution of Catalan politicians intensified, Sánchez was left standing alone as the sole representative of a generation of politicians brought up under democracy. Because he seemed the lesser evil to Barcelona’s establishment, he could also accept the votes of Oriol Junqueras — the imprisoned Catalan vice-president — to table a constructive motion of no confidence — a constitutional mechanism that allows an opposition leader to unseat the prime minister and take office himself, bypassing a general election.
Although in the Spanish political system votes of no confidence have always been something of a pantomime — a way of preparing the public for changes of government long before the fact — Sánchez did bring Mariano Rajoy down. The Spanish right was enraged, but Sánchez had the support of Europe and of the independence politicians, who used him as a shield. Europe was already dealing with Donald Trump and needed peace to hold in Spain. Carles Puigdemont was exiled in Brussels, and seeing him handed over to Madrid would inevitably have recalled what the Gestapo did to Lluís Companys, the former Catalan president executed in 1940. The memory of Francoism was a burden for the PP, and it was no accident that one of the first things Sánchez’s government did was turn the Valle de los Caídos into a museum. Barcelona is the capital of anti-Francoism and of the left’s aesthetic imagination: without the Catalans, the Basque right can neither negotiate with Madrid nor keep former ETA supporters in check.
The PSOE, which a century ago had already taken part in Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship to stop Catalan campaigns for self-government, has under Sánchez become the alpha party of Spanish democracy. As it has done at other times, under other political regimes, Spain is again trying to trap Catalonia inside a dead idea. Now it is the dead idea of democracy, just as in the seventeenth century it was the dead idea of empire, or after the War of the Spanish Succession — when England left the Catalans in the lurch — it was the dead idea of absolute monarchy. The point is to stop time and strip the bones of the present clean, so that the conflict between Catalonia and Castile does not finally erupt in the open.
Sánchez’s quixotic streak comes out of this historical sediment — or this democratic residue. Quixote is a caricature of cuixot, a Catalan word once used to describe thigh armour worn in the Middle Ages. Cervantes says that Tirant lo Blanc is the best book of chivalry because Joanot Martorell was proposing a reform of the old medieval codes, drawing on the tradition preserved by Warwick the Kingmaker. Don Quixote longs for Tirant lo Blanc in a Hispanic empire dominated by Castilians. Sánchez longs for Catalan anti-Francoism, and for the democratic values promoted by Catalonia, in a Madrid that no longer admires Barcelona or copies it as it did when he was a child and the PSOE seemed to be what it was not: the party of the good guys.
In a bureaucratised Europe that has turned its virtues into dogma to defend privileges it can no longer afford, the quixotic adventures of Sancho Sánchez are bound to grow ever more influential. Just look at the Hispanic empire’s dark and long decline. Don Quixote marked a symbolic break: it severed the Hispanic empire from the Mediterranean and humanist imagination with which the Catalans had sought to imbue it. If one is so inclined, it is easy to see Charles V as a kind of Quixote, attempting to navigate a world no longer his own — with Tirant lo Blanc as his manual — before being defeated by Luther and the rigidities of the Counter-Reformation. Now that nation-states are dissolving into continental structures, Sánchez is attempting to turn the democratic aspirations of the Catalans who voted in the 2017 referendum into rhetorical fuel to justify Spain before Europe, and Europe before the United States and the world.
While the Catalans have turned their backs on Madrid — they have recovered their language, lost their businesses, and no longer believe collaboration with the Castilians is possible — Sánchez is saturating Catalonia with impoverished immigrants, much as the dictatorship once did. The Spanish prime minister hopes that out of this social ferment something will emerge to secure the sentimental and political hegemony of the PSOE, which the Germans and the Americans underwrote during the Transition. The hypocrisy is that, this time, immigrants are not coming to sustain a dictatorship but a democracy, and they arrive with the complicity not of a bourgeoisie but of decadent, extractive elites. Sánchez wants to feed on Catalonia’s civic energy, as many predecessors have done before him, but the Catalans are Europeans, and the consequences of the tug-of-war between Barcelona and Madrid will, in the end, be paid for by the whole continent.
Since 1950, Catalonia has absorbed around 3.4 million net immigrants, raising its population from 3.2 million inhabitants to 8.1 million today. Valencia has taken in some 2.2 million, and Mallorca roughly 700,000 over the same period. In other words, the Catalan-speaking territories have absorbed net immigration equivalent to more than 100 per cent of their original population. The backbone of the former Crown of Aragon is not merely another corner of Europe inundated by immigrants. Historically, its inhabitants have also been those who connected the State as a whole with Europe, pulling it away from the gravitational influence of the South and spearheading its modernization. One need only turn to history to see that the finest contributions to Western culture from Spain have, to date, reached the Continent by way of its Mediterranean flank — not to mention the fact that it is in Barcelona where Don Quixote finally regains his lucidity.
Many elsewhere in Europe might be tempted to dismiss the Catalan cause as irrelevant or sentimental. I would argue that it has been centuries since the struggles of the Catalans aligned so closely with those of their fellow Europeans. It is unsurprising that the torch of Catalan survival is now passing from the establishment forces that have cynically carried it for the past decade to newer actors apparently more closely aligned with the challenges facing the rest of Europe. Junts, the centrist party which led the previous push for self-determination, has crashed in the polls as the right-wing Aliança Catalana and the left-wing parties surge. In so many ways, the struggle within Catalonia now reflects the struggle of each and every country in Europe: new parties of the extremes battling to define national identity as the ailing establishment of a larger structure seeks to cling to the past.
The man who eventually finds a way through these challenges will need more than quixotic ambition and good looks.
This article was written by Enric Vila, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?