One can probably mark the ‘last days of Pedro Sánchez’ beginning with the carousel of former Sánchez allies who are facing charges or are now in prison for corruption. This includes the man who made Sánchez his protegé, the former PSOE Prime Minister Luis Zapatero. His former right-hand man and party Secretary, José Luis Ábalos, became the first serving congressman to be incarcerated since the transition to democracy. As an ex-PSOE secretary, his main legacy for the party is that it now forbids its members from using ‘sex workers’ — after recordings during the investigation of the Koldo Affair revealed that Ábalos and his aide had arranged meetings with them. Ábalos was sentenced to 24 years by the Supreme Court in June for the crimes of ‘criminal organisation, bribery, embezzlement and influence peddling’.
However, as a good socialist once said, ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’: the central point in this narrative is of course the Ceuta invasion of over 70,000 people from Morocco, and the thousands who remain in Ceuta as Morocco refuses to take non-Moroccans back. Between twee stories about illegal immigrants cleaning the beach, there are also reports of children being sent to hospital as possible rape victims. At this point, Iberian anti-racists gleefully pointed out online that the victims were not Spanish but immigrants themselves. What could be more anti-racist than dismissing the potential victims of rape because they are foreign?
The effects of the Ceuta invasion and Sánchez´s actions in the aftermath have produced the reaction by EU states that most people desperately wanted to see — as to the situation in Spain, however, the situation remains bleak even if the faintest of silver linings are becoming visible in these last days of Sánchez.
The first relevant episode to recount was an unprecedented moment of political ecumenicalism in which both immigration maximalist parties, Podemos and Sumar, found themselves on the same side as the Spanish nationalist party Vox. What could bring together such a disparate grouping? A call for the government to demand that Morocco be excluded from hosting the 2030 World Cup, and for Spain to withdraw if they were not.
For parties such as Sumar and Podemos to openly announce that the Moroccan state is responsible for this crisis puts them directly in opposition to the Sánchez Government, which still maintains the fantasy that it was human traffickers and not the Moroccan dictatorship. This is a particularly significant development because Sumar still remains a member of the government and the crucial member of what is now a rapidly disintegrating coalition.
Sánchez´s PSOE did not win the last election in 2023. PSOE, in fact, came second, gaining a seat and an increased share of the vote by 3.68% — but with the right a few seats away from being able to form a government, the new electoral calculus produced a result that enabled Sánchez to form a ‘negative coalition’ with the regional nationalists intended to lock out PP-Vox. This was thanks to eating his own former coalition partners, Podemos, who were subsumed into Sumar (the infighting amongst left-wing minority parties itself worthy of a War and Peace-style tome). Since then, votes for the progressive left Sumar have plunged to such an extent that former Minister of Labour and party leader Yolanda Diaz announced in February that she would not contest the election in 2027. In short, the hollowed-out corpse of what people would term the radical left is largely a spent force. As human waves swam across to Spain from Morocco, Sanchez´s coalition partners understood the ship was now sinking. This is a world away from the confidence of Spain´s radical progressives in toppling PSOE in 2016 (when Podemos were just 1% behind PSOE on 21.2%), which has now become an exercise in mere survival in this new era.
However, the killer blow is likely to come not from those on his own flank but from Catalonia. Think back to the October 1st 2017 unofficial referendum in Catalonia, in which Junts per Catalunya Leader Carlos Puigdemont and a whole host of people within the Catalan independence movement found themselves on the run or awaiting prison charges. In the subsequent Catalan Regional election in December 2017, Junts formed a coalition with ERC (the left-wing Catalan Nationalists), with Puigdemont leading in exile.
Fast forward to 2026, and Catalan politics changed as PSOE became the largest party in Catalonia in the regional election of 2024, but this electoral success was largely bought at the price of a mass amnesty of Catalan politicians involved in the Referendum and UDI. Indeed, at the previous general election of 2023, Sanchez explicitly stated there would be no deal with Catalan nationalists committed to the separation of the Spanish state to stay in power. Once the electoral numbers came in and Sanchez knew he could only stay in power with such a deal, an amnesty law was passed in March 2024. This deception would have been more shocking if Spanish voters hadn´t already become so numb to it.
Still, gratitude expires with time, and the Junts Leader in the Spanish Parliament, Miriam Nogueras, has explicitly stated that Catalonia will not take any MENA´s (‘Underage’ immigrants) from Ceuta and any attempt to move them will have her bring down the government. Junts already split from the coalition government in 2025, meaning Spain has not passed a budget and retains a zombie government, surviving only to serve the vanity of a man who is despised at home and distrusted in Europe.
Why have Junts suddenly moved against Sánchez now? The cynical reason is that since they got their pound of flesh back in 2024, they have nothing to gain from continuing to prop up this farce; the other, less cynical reason is perhaps the most overlooked development in Spanish politics by outsiders — the dramatic rise of the hardline, massively anti immigration Catalan Nationalists of Aliança Catalana (Catalan Alliance).
Since entering the Catalan Parliament in 2024 with just two seats and 3% of the vote, they are predicted to become the second largest party in 2028 with 17% and 28 seats. Their voter base has come from the rural or peripheral areas of Catalonia that had long been Junts’ heartland, and the Catalan Alliance are eating from the very support base that Junts took for granted. The demographics of Catalonia have shifted massively in ten years, and now half of all people living in Catalonia between the ages of 30 and 40 are non-Spanish, let alone non-Catalan. Last year, data from Instituto de Estadística de Cataluña showed another 70,000 immigrants moved into Catalonia in 2025.
Catalan historians, such as Albert Balcells, have argued that the Franco regime deliberately encouraged Spanish immigration to the region in an effort to weaken Catalan identity. How Francoist policy became a left-wing ‘nationalist’ sacred cow in the first place is an indictment of the viral mutation of left-wing politics, completely detached from the groups it was founded to care about.
Catalonia has already shifted to the same immigration hostility as the rest of the Spanish Regions. The Regional Governments of Castilla y León, Aragón and Extremadura (once a PSOE heartland) have refused to attend a meeting this Wednesday with the Government on the MENA crisis. These governments are all now led by the Partido Popular (PP, which is a useful shorthand for the pensioners party that they are) and Vox. PSOE regionally after the last cycle have been annihilated everywhere bar Catalonia and Asturias.
Andalucía, for so long the bastion of PSOE, is now lost and the party only holds 23% of the vote. To provide some context for this collapse, PSOE has not increased its vote share in Andalucía since 2004, and every new election has brought it to historic new lows. This is a husk of a party. In 2023, PSOE were removed in Aragon, Valencia, and La Rioja, and in every regional election since, the haemorrhaging has continued. In 2025, PSOE lost 14% of the vote in Extremadura. It is only in the aforementioned Catalonia and Castilla–La Mancha that PSOE cling on. This raises the question: if PSOE are doing so badly, why haven’t they already axed Sánchez?
The answer to this problem is rather paradoxical — the worse PSOE does at the regional level, the stronger Sánchez’s internal position becomes. In Spanish politics, the leaders with institutional power to stand against Sánchez would come from Regional Governments. Now that the PSOE only hold three of the seventeen Autonomous Communities, the party has been completely hollowed out. Even worse, in all those subsequent regional elections Sanchez was able to appoint loyalists as the main candidates. For him this was a win-win in which — if by some miracle — PSOE reclaimed a regional government, its head could be a trusted ally, and if they lost (as they inevitably did), chances of internal opposition slimmed further. As the situation has worsened nationally and in Europe, the glorification of Sachez as the only hope has strengthened.
Despite all of this, recent polling shows PSOE nationally remains the second-largest party at 25% with PP at 34%. Data like this gives me no confidence for Spain. Both major political parties in Spain have gorged their ageing voters on inflation-proof pensions and waves of immigration to keep propping up the pyramid scheme instead of confronting reality. The winners of the transition who have only ever known an unearned entitlement are, as in most Western states, the dominating voter blocs. Spain´s democracy has mutated into a ‘jubiladora’, a dictatorship of pensioners. As Spain´s birth rate collapses to levels only comparable with the civil war and any of its young people who can flee the country, still the ungrateful generation will continue to be prioritised.
Vox, who are perhaps the harshest on immigration, do have the largest support amongst voters 18-29 in the latest poll from Spanish newspaper La Razon. But with an abstention rate of over 50%, even if PSOE are removed, it is almost impossible to see PP in the next Congress having the guts to course-correct the country. Vox would probably do well to avoid any formal coalition with PP and wait for the inevitable crisis when PP blink at the first time they need to choose between more immigrants and discriminating against foreign property buyers or cutting pensions.
In Europe, there may be some hope. The 22 signatures from all sides of the political spectrum to a letter which directly highlighted the legalisation of a million-plus people by Sanchez and Spain´s complete lack of preparedness to defend its borders (which are of course Europe´s borders) is a sign of things to come. I am old enough to remember when Polish PM Donald Tusk was still considered a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ here; his scathing comments and urging of Spain to take the same brutal defence of its borders as Poland is a sign that the window has shifted. Rhetoric is slowly catching up to reality. After 20 years of screeching racist at anyone for thinking open borders was a terrible idea, it is the immigration maximalists who are now rightly seen for the political extremists that they are.
Even Sanchez´s petty response to Italy in suspending Schengen for them (whilst still saying nothing about Morocco) is of massive use. For all his crocodile tears about how European states cannot unilaterally remove countries from Schengen (this being his primary criticism of Italy), the reality is that they can. So by his own actions, the precedent that countries can shut their borders and discriminate has now been established by PSOE. At no point now could a future PSOE leader legitimately (in the eyes of voters) criticise any Spanish government for closing the borders however they see fit. After all, PSOE already did it. Hopefully, Europe after Sanchez will at least be able to force any Spanish leader now to stop the importation of undesirable immigration and any future legalisations, or very swiftly remove them from the club.
Moreover, the Moroccan dictatorship may have realised that they have overplayed their hand, with statements now appearing in the Spanish press that they want to take back their underage immigrants. The mass protests in Ceuta and the proliferation of MENAs across Spain mean it´s highly unlikely any regional government or opposition party will be stopping there. If I had to bet, the race will be on across the entire political spectrum to also demand the deportation of Morocco MENA´s in the mainland. So for Europe, this may be the frog in the boiling water moment that it needed to realise that importing millions of people from countries and cultures that despise you is, shock horror, a bad idea.
So what of Sanchez? He has survived before, but this really does feel like the end. There is now no European support, there are no more radical left voters left to subsume, and there are no separatist parties left to beg. His only hope may be a snap election in Autumn and an attempt to turn the election into him versus Donald Trump (as seen in Canada and Australia); it seems unlikely that the old tunes will work. As much as Guardian readers want to believe that Europeans not wanting more immigrants assaulting them in the street or wondering if the next Christmas market will be the victim of yet another Islamist attack is some far-right American import, times have changed. People have simply become radicalised by reality.
When Sanchez came into power, he did so not via an election but by winning a no-confidence vote against former PP leader Rajoy in June 2018. In this moment, he promised to wash away the corruption of PP and lead Spain with dignity. After eight years of premiership, his ministers are in prison, and his only idea for economic growth has been the now completely discredited policy of importing waves of immigrants with cheap tourism to avoid reforming the country. He has hollowed out institution after institution, including his own party.
His legacy? Pedro Sanchez is the dead end of Europe´s open borders experiment. Let us pray that when he goes, he takes that corpse with him.
This article was written by MetinMadrid. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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