Once in office, Mr. Sánchez displayed remarkable audacity. In 2023, after calling a snap election, he struck a controversial deal with Catalan separatists. In exchange for their support, Mr. Sánchez offered amnesty for anyone linked to the illegal referendum on Catalan independence held in 2017, including those showing no remorse. Many in the judiciary opposed the deal, which caused a meltdown among conservatives and set off huge public protests. But the gamble paid off. Mr. Sánchez stayed in power, and after the amnesty deal was enshrined in law, support for Catalan independence receded significantly.
Such risk-taking has been in the service of an idealistic agenda that Mr. Sánchez calls progressivism that works. Between 2018 and 2025, he increased the minimum wage by 61 percent, as well as introduced labor reforms to reduce unemployment, curb short-term contracts, make it harder to fire workers, and protect women and L.G.B.T. Q. people from workplace discrimination. These policies, combined with higher taxes on the rich and generous support for workers during the pandemic, were the prelude to a triumphant relaunch of the Spanish economy. By 2024, The Economist was heralding Spain as the world’s “best-performing rich economy.”
Mr. Sánchez has also tried to bring accountability for Spain’s dictatorial past. In 2019, he secured the removal of the remains of Gen. Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, Spain’s grandest public monument and the dictator’s memorial to his victory in the Spanish Civil War. And in 2022, against stiff opposition from conservatives, he enacted the Law of Democratic Memory. Most notably, this landmark law compelled the government to locate, exhume and rebury some 2,000 mass graves containing the remains of as many as 150,000 victims of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship.
Yet no one should mistake Mr. Sánchez for an ideologue. His pragmatism is unmistakable, especially when it comes to the economy. The so-called “Iberian Miracle,” anchored in a booming tourist sector, high-value service exports, automobile manufacturing and renewable energy, has been accompanied by Mr. Sánchez’s courting of Chinese investment. Another building block of the miracle is an immigration policy that though generous — a law regularizing the status of 500,000 undocumented people went into effect this year — gives priority to Latin Americans who can assimilate into Spain and those willing to fill jobs that are unwanted by Spaniards.
To be sure, replicating Mr. Sánchez’s success elsewhere won’t be easy. For one thing, Spain’s aversion to the far right — rooted in its relatively recent experience with dictatorship — has put limits on the radical right’s appeal, unlike elsewhere in Europe. What’s more, the presence of sizable forces to Mr. Sánchez’s left has allowed him to borrow their ideas without losing his status as a responsible politician: He can cleave to the left or disavow it, as circumstances dictate. His skill at outmaneuvering right-wing opponents and sidestepping scandals would be even harder to match.
