Why Pedro Sánchez is in one of his worst moments since he became president of the government of Spain
The environment of the Spanish president is dotted with cases of corruption while the opposition demands early elections
The president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, has problems piling up.
The corruption scandals that affect his closest family and political environment are accumulating and voices are growing demanding that he call elections and put an end to a government that has been in a minority for years and months without being able to carry out significant initiatives in Parliament.
The latest setbacks for Sánchez have been the start of the trial against his brother David, accused of administrative prevarication and influence peddling for allegedly having benefited from a public job created specifically for him, and the judicial investigation of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, one of his main political allies, for alleged influence peddling and other crimes in relation to the rescue with public money of the Venezuelan capital airline Plus Ultra.
But his wife, Begoña Gómez, and leaders who had the trust of Sánchez, such as his former Minister of Transportation, José Luis Ábalos, also face investigations or judicial proceedings for alleged crimes.
Meanwhile, the PSOE has chained defeat after defeat in the succession of elections held in different Spanish regions in recent months and the polls do not predict anything better for those scheduled for next year.
The situation has led the opposition Popular Party (PP) to demand immediate general elections that put an end to a "corrupt government" and the parties that have up to now supported his government to distance themselves from Sánchez, who refuses an early election because, as he said, "the general interest of citizens, today, with wars all over the world, with crises that require effective and equitable responses (...), is stability."
The allusion to the international situation as a justification for denying the electoral advance that his critics demand reflects what analysts consider one of his main strengths: his prestige outside of Spain.
Sánchez has been one of the European leaders who has previously and most openly opposed Donald Trump's United States and the military offensives that Israel has carried out in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, in the latter case with the support of Washington.
Furthermore, with measures that go against the dominant trend in Europe, such as the massive regularization of undocumented immigrants in Spain approved last April, it has become a benchmark for the global left.
How do you explain the contradiction between Sánchez's international prominence and his internal wear and tear?
The internal situation
Pedro Sánchez has been president of the Spanish government since June 2, 2018, when the motion of censure he presented against the then president Mariano Rajoy was successful, following the condemnation of the PP, then in government, for illegal financing.
In these 8 years, Sánchez has led a coalition government with parties to the left of the PSOE that, despite not having a majority in the Congress of Deputies, has remained in power thanks to the more or less enthusiastic support of Catalan and Basque nationalist and independence groups.
But in recent times, the government has encountered increasing difficulties in carrying out its initiatives in Parliament, especially after the break with Junts, the Catalan independence party that was decisive for Sánchez to be able to repeat as president in 2023 by voting in favor of his investiture in exchange for a controversial amnesty for crimes committed within the framework of the failed attempt to secede from Catalonia in 2017.
The government has been unable to pass any important law for months and since 2023 it has been extending the General State Budget due to the lack of support for new public accounts.
According to what Lluís Orriols, a political scientist at the Carlos III University of Madrid, told BBC Mundo, “all this is having an effect on Sánchez's popularity and there is wear and tear on the Socialist Party due to not being able to carry out its agenda or approve the budgets.”
The government maintains that, even without budgets, it has managed to approve important social measures, such as subsidies for public transport or increases in pensions and minimum wages.
Added to his parliamentary minority is the string of judicial cases surrounding the party and the president's family.
If his brother responds to justice these days in a trial that began last Thursday in the Provincial Court of Badajoz, his wife, Begoña Gómez, will do so soon after having been prosecuted for the alleged crimes of influence peddling, embezzlement, business corruption and misappropriation.
Gómez is accused of using her personal relationship to boost her private career through a position at the Complutense University of Madrid. She is also accused of using public resources to favor private interests.
Both defendants maintain their innocence, which the president also publicly defends.
Scandals in his political circle
Outside his family environment, the scandals also extend to his immediate political circle. Sánchez has been hit by the recent accusation of former President Zapatero, of whom the National Court is investigating whether he led an influence peddling network that led to the million-dollar public aid that allowed the Venezuelan capital airline Plus Ultra to stay afloat.
Zapatero has also said that he is innocent and Sánchez that he believes in his innocence.
“Symbolically speaking, this case is very significant,” Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain at the polling firm Ipsos, told the BBC. "The fact that he is the first former prime minister [to be investigated] makes it extremely serious. But also because he has been a moral reference for his party."
At the same time, the Supreme Court has been judging José Luis Ábalos, former Minister of Transport and former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, since April 2025, for the alleged collection of bribes in the purchase of medical supplies during the Covid pandemic, a scandal that also led to the arrest of his successor at the head of the PSOE management, Santos Cerdán.
Sánchez and the party have maintained that Ábalos betrayed their trust and were unaware of his alleged criminal activities. “From a personal point of view, he was a great stranger to me,” said the president of the man who was minister and responsible for the management of his party.
According to Orriols, “the corruption scandals are going to have a cumulative effect of wear and tear and more and more voters of the Socialist Party are going to say 'this is how far we have come'”.
But the expert points out that Sánchez “still has a float in the economy, in which many favorable macro aspects can be seen.”
"The polls place it about four points below the Popular Party; if it were not for the economic situation, we would see it more sunk," he points out.
The weight of Sánchez's international image
But at the same time as his internal problems multiply, Sánchez has managed to build his own profile on the international scene that has made him one of the leaders of the left inside and outside Europe.
Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, in the United States, told BBC Mundo that "Sánchez is one of the few social democratic leaders who is head of government and one of the few who is truly progressive. In addition, he has confronted Trump, something that most European prime ministers do not do."
Indeed, Sánchez openly opposed the US and Israeli offensive against Iran and his government denied the US Army the use of its military bases in Spanish territory for operations.
The Spanish president was also one of the first world leaders to denounce the attacks that Israel has carried out in Gaza since Hamas militants infiltrated its territory on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage.
Sánchez denounced that, with its offensive in Gaza, in which more than 70,000 people have already died, Israel was “exterminating a people that is defenseless” and “breaking all the laws of Humanitarian Law.”
“It is one thing to protect your country, your society, and quite another to bomb hospitals and starve innocent boys and girls,” said the Spanish president in September 2025 when announcing a series of measures to confront the Israeli offensive in the Strip, which he described as “genocide.”
Sánchez's government has also been the only NATO government that has refused to accept Trump's demand to increase its defense spending to 5% of GDP.
Trump has threatened with trade retaliation against Spain, which he has described as a "terrible" ally, but, far from rectifying, Sánchez has insisted on his position in different international forums and even in opinion articles in prestigious foreign media such as the British The Economist, where he assured that the United States' war against Iran "is illegal, a great threat to the international order based on rules and contrary to the interests of humanity."
In a forum in The New York Times he defended his decision to give papers to hundreds of thousands of foreigners in an irregular situation in Spain, a measure that clearly contrasts with Trump's mass deportations in the United States.
The international profile he has cultivated as a supporter of the fight against climate change, gender equality and multilateralism has earned him awards and recognition from UN Women, the United Nations Foundation and the Gates Foundation.
The opposition in Spain alleges that he has used his external projection to divert attention from his government's mismanagement and cases of corruption.
What can happen from now on
Sánchez's political career is full of moments in which he managed to emerge when everything was against him, such as when he regained, thanks to the support of the militants, the leadership of his party, from which he had been removed by the rest of his leadership, or when he achieved, against the odds, enough votes to form a government after the 2023 elections.
The Spanish president has made this capacity one of his hallmarks, to the point that he published a book titled “Manual of resistance.”
The questions now are whether Sánchez will once again survive an adverse outlook and remain in office until the elections scheduled for mid-2027, and to what extent his prestige outside of Spain will help him do so.
If Sánchez does not call the early elections demanded by the opposition, his fate will remain in the hands of the parties that have supported him in Congress until now.
And although several of them have ended their support for Sánchez's Executive, they have not committed their vote in favor of the motion of censure that the Popular Party should promote to overthrow him.
The PP would probably need the support of the far-right Vox to form an alternative government and that is unacceptable for the rest of the formations.
“I don't see any incentive for the government to call elections, no matter how blocked the situation is and no matter how much it is affected by scandals,” says Paco Camas.
The analyst considers that, like last year after the scandal of the Ábalos and Cerdán commissions, the summer break could provide Sánchez with a much-needed respite, allowing him to regain some political initiative in September.
Lluís Orriols, for his part, believes that “this is a government that has been in a very delicate situation for some time now and the possibility that it will soon run out of air cannot be ruled out.”
Be that as it may - before because Sánchez calls early elections or later because the legislature is ending - the Spaniards will have the last word.
And, as Cas Mudde recalls, although the outside world closely observes its international profile, “the Spaniards will pay attention to domestic politics.”