Survivor of Madrid: Why Spaniards Can’t Decide What to Do with Pedro Sánchez
Most Spaniards disapprove of their scandal-scarred prime minister — yet he remains the only major European leader whose numbers are rising, while rural Spain quietly drifts further from his government’s reach
Pedro Sánchez has built a political career on being written off. Eight years into his premiership, Spaniards view their leader through a lens that is equal parts exhaustion, grudging respect and outright hostility — and which of those dominates depends heavily on where in Spain you ask the question.
A nation that disapproves, but won’t quite abandon him
The topline numbers are unforgiving. YouGov’s January 2026 tracker put Sánchez at 34% favorable against 65% unfavorable — a net rating of minus 31. In most democracies, that is the profile of a leader on his way out. Yet the same survey placed him third among six major European leaders, ahead of Germany’s Friedrich Merz (26%) and far ahead of France’s Emmanuel Macron (16%). Spaniards dislike their prime minister at roughly the going European rate — and by spring, the trend had turned in his favor. An April 2026 Euroscope survey found Sánchez the only major EU leader with a clearly positive approval index (+8), up four points from February, at a moment when Macron, Meloni, Merz and von der Leyen were all sinking.
That rebound has an identifiable cause: crisis abroad flatters incumbents at home. International tensions — including the Iran crisis and, more recently, Sánchez’s handling of Washington after President Trump’s threat to cut off trade with Spain — have allowed him to play the statesman (Trump has not followed through with his threat; see box below). An April Sociométrica poll showed the PSOE recovering to a projected 110 seats, its best figure in months, though still well behind the Popular Party’s 140, with the combined right commanding an absolute majority above 200 seats.
| The feud between President Donald Trump and Pedro Sánchez has run through three main flashpoints, all rooted in Sánchez positioning Spain as the alliance’s chief holdout against Trump’s demands. The original spark was NATO defense spending. Trump demanded that European members commit to spending 5% of GDP on defense, and Spain alone refused, securing a carve-out at the 2025 summit. Sánchez argued the target was unnecessary — Spain meets the existing 2% benchmark, ranks seventh among NATO’s 32 members in contributions, and NATO’s own projections suggest around 2.1% is enough to meet commitments. Trump has treated the opt-out as freeloading ever since and repeatedly threatened to make Spain pay for it through trade. The second front was Iran. Madrid blocked American use of its Rota and Morón bases for U.S. bombing operations against Iran, which prompted Trump to threaten economic retaliation as early as March 2026. It all boiled over at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8, when Trump ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “cut off all trade” with Spain, calling the country “a wasted cause” and “terrible” as a partner, saying “we don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore.” Sánchez, who arrived at the summit prepared for the attack, responded with studied calm — publicly insisting U.S./Spain ties remain “very positive” and declining to escalate rhetorically. Trump’s July 8 declaration looks increasingly like rhetoric rather than policy. There has been no formal retraction, but the pattern is telling. Trump issued essentially the same directive in March 2026; trade continued normally and the order never appeared in the Federal Register. He has threatened Spain over the NATO opt-out since October 2025 without acting. Pedro Sánchez, for his part, shrugged off the latest salvo, calling U.S./Spain ties “very positive,” while Madrid officials described the episode as “business as usual.” The structural problem: since 1993, trade policy has been an exclusive EU competence. Washington negotiates with Brussels, not Madrid, and — as Sánchez’s office noted — individual member states “cannot be singled out” within the customs union. Enforcement would be nearly impossible in practice, since Spanish goods move freely through the single market and could be processed or routed through another EU country before reaching U.S. ports. Any attempt to target Spain alone would likely trigger coordinated EU retaliation against U.S. exports bloc wide. The stakes are not trivial: U.S./Spain trade totaled roughly $75 billion in goods and services in 2025 — including Spanish olive oil, wine and pharmaceuticals — and the U.S. runs a goods surplus of more than $5 billion, meaning an embargo would hit American exporters, including agriculture, on the losing end of the ledger. USTR Jamieson Greer insists the president has the legal authority under IEEPA to act. So far, no one in Madrid or Brussels appears to be planning for the day he uses it. Notably, the confrontation has helped Sánchez at home: standing up to Trump plays well across much of the Spanish electorate, and pollsters partly credit the foreign-policy friction for his spring 2026 approval rebound. |
The paradox is that this partial recovery coexists with the deepest scandal environment of his tenure. His wife, Begoña Gómez, was charged in April 2026 with embezzlement and influence peddling. His hand-picked attorney general became the first in Spanish history convicted of a crime. The developing “Leire Díez affair” alleges a party-funded effort to obstruct judicial investigations. And the electoral map is bleeding: historic Socialist defeats in Extremadura, Andalucía and Aragón in late 2025 stripped away regional strongholds. Urban, progressive Spain largely shrugs — voters there long ago priced in the scandals and view the alternative, a PP government dependent on Vox, as worse. Conservative Spain regards Sánchez as illegitimate to his core. There is remarkably little middle ground left.
The rural sector: certainty, not ideology
If there is a structural weakness beneath Sánchez’s resilience, it lies in the countryside. Rural Spain — the España vaciada, or “emptied Spain,” where 70% of the territory holds just 10% of the population — has spent this decade in a slow-burning revolt over depopulation, drought, EU environmental regulation and farm economics.
From the graphic above, you can see most of the country votes conservative —blue. An analyst notes that Sanchez lost the last election, but when the conservatives could not cobble together a government, Sanchez did by granting pardons and special deals to separatists and also by his having opened the flood gate on immigration. Sanchez performs poorly in rural areas but also in conservative strongholds in Madrid and in the south.
The tractor protests that erupted in 2024 never fully resolved. Farmers’ core grievances remain what they were: Brussels-driven paperwork, thin margins squeezed by fuel and fertilizer costs, and what they see as unfair competition from non-EU producers who face none of the environmental rules Spanish growers must absorb. Agriculture Minister Luis Planas has engaged the sector, and the government has been careful never to appear “anti-farmer,” but the underlying arithmetic of rural life has not improved.
Politically, though, rural Spain has not swung uniformly to any one flag. Vox has made real inroads with its brand of rural nationalism — anti-Brussels, anti-green-transition, pro-hunting and pro-irrigation — and its opposition to the government’s newest rural policy, a program steering immigrants toward depopulated villages to keep bakeries, bars and schools alive, gives it a fresh grievance to organize around. But as one rural observer put it during the protest wave, what farmers yearn for “is not fascism or communism, but rather certainty, stability and the possibility of making a living.” Some rural voters still back left-leaning unions; in Catalonia, some channel discontent through pro-independence parties. The countryside is contested ground, not conquered ground.
What is clear is that rural Spaniards largely experience the Sánchez government as distant — a Madrid administration that speaks fluently to Brussels and to urban voters but treats the interior as a problem to be managed. The immigrant-resettlement initiative captures the dynamic: ministers frame it as the villages’ only demographic lifeline, Vox frames it as recklessness, and the villagers themselves are conspicuously absent from the conversation.
Note: Vox is Spain’s hard-right nationalist party — the third-largest force in the Spanish parliament. It was founded in 2013 by defectors from the conservative Popular Party (PP) and has been led since 2014 by Santiago Abascal. The name is Latin for “voice.”
The bottom line
Spaniards’ view of Sánchez in mid-2026 is best understood not as approval or disapproval but as a stalemate. A clear majority wants change; no majority agrees on what change should look like, and the fragmented left and a PP shackled to Vox leave voters without a clean alternative. With general elections not scheduled until August 2027, Sánchez has time — and he has repeatedly shown that time is the resource he uses best. The sharpest question in Spanish politics today is the one an analyst posed in June: not whether Sánchez can withstand the storm, but whether anyone in the opposition is competent enough to inherit the ship. Rural Spain, unpersuaded by either answer, will keep casting its votes as it casts its seed — hedging against a climate no one in Madrid seems able to control. One Spain-based contact, asked to respond, said: “Sánchez is in scandals, corruption, and a series of international setbacks are likely to force him out of office. Here in Spain, you can hear people talking about it everywhere, and the polls suggest that the Socialist Party is on track for its worst result in history.”
