“Despite the caricature that the right and the extreme right in politics and the media have tried to make of me, I have never been attached to the position,” Pedro Sánchez himself highlighted in the surprising letter to the citizens that he published last Wednesday on his networks. social, in which he opened the door to resigning from the presidency of the Government that cost him so much to revalidate, against all odds, just five months ago.
Although, indeed, the right and even his internal enemies in the PSOE have always accused him of being willing to do anything to cling to power, the truth is that Sánchez’s political career, always punctuated by unexpected plot twists, Since he assumed the socialist leadership in 2014, he has already given ample evidence of his detachment from the position, although his critics have always disdained it as a mere political survival tactic.
Sánchez’s first resignation, as general secretary of the PSOE, crowned the convulsive federal committee held in Ferraz on October 1, 2016, after being defenestrated by the entire socialist establishment. The young leader of the white shirt – he was born in Madrid, in 1972 – flatly refused to invest Mariano Rajoy as president of the Government, and tried to put together an alternative parliamentary majority to that of the Popular Party, with what he called “the forces change”. A “Frankenstein Government”, as baptized by his predecessor in the socialist leadership, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, which included the emerging Podemos of Pablo Iglesias, which revolutionized the space to the left of the PSOE, but also the Catalan independence movement. Anathema. And Sánchez had already sealed an investiture agreement with the emerging Ciudadanos of Albert Rivera, which tried to consolidate a central space in Spain.
And the same living forces of the PSOE that supported Sánchez as a replacement for the veteran Rubalcaba and leader of the party, in the extraordinary federal congress of July 2014, chose to throw him out the window, in the federal committee of October 1, 2016, the hecticest that has been remembered in Ferraz in many years. Sánchez’s resignation left the party in the hands of a manager led by veteran Javier Fernández, then president of Asturias and representative of the old socialist order. “Once the dog is dead, the rabies is over,” celebrated Sánchez’s critics, who thought they had gotten rid of him permanently.
Sánchez’s second resignation, with tears in his eyes, came a few days later. On October 29, 2016, he announced his resignation from the position of deputy in Congress that he had worked so hard to obtain, first in 2009 to fill the vacancy left by Pedro Solbes, and then in 2013 when Cristina Narbona left her seat. Sánchez handed in his deputy certificate, in an appearance in which he was visibly distressed, so as not to have to break the voting discipline of the socialist group, which just hours later facilitated the investiture of the leader of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, as president of the Government .
The story is known. After a period of reflection, like the one he has now been involved in, Sánchez ended up deciding to return and fight to regain the leadership of the PSOE. And, against all odds, he did it. In May 2017, he was re-elected general secretary, after defeating Susana Díaz, then all-powerful president of the Junta de Andalucía, and former president Patxi López. Supported by socialist-based militancy, and against all the great leaders of the party. In June he returned to take the reins of the party in the federal congress in which he regained the crown. As head of the opposition, Sánchez did close ranks with Rajoy to apply article 155 of the Constitution in Catalonia, in response to the fleeting unilateral declaration of independence promoted by Carles Puigdemont in October 2017. The former president of the Generalitat has been in office since then fled from Spanish justice in Belgium, and now returns to head the Junts list for the elections in Catalonia on May 12.
After the publication of the Gürtel case ruling, which made the PP a lucrative participant in the corruption plot, it promoted the unexpected motion of censure that overthrew Rajoy as head of the Executive, on June 1, 2018, and brought Sánchez to the Moncloa palace. In just 24 heart-stopping hours, the leader of the PSOE had to form his first Government. But the impossibility of approving its first general state budgets – Esquerra presented an amendment to the entire budget, failing to make progress in resolving the Catalan political conflict – forced new general elections. In April and November 2019.
Sánchez, forcibly hanged, ended up forming the first coalition government of democracy, with Pablo Iglesias. And he pardoned the independence leaders who were imprisoned. But, after the failure of the municipal and regional elections in May 2023, he precipitated new general elections to try to stop the wave of the right. He also achieved it, again against all odds, and despite the electoral victory of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, he reissued his progressive coalition government, now with Yolanda Díaz as leader of Sumar, last November 2023, after joining the investiture pact to Junts thanks to a controversial Amnesty law for those accused of the independence process that is still being processed in the Senate.
The tireless “operation of harassment and demolition” by the right against the president’s wife, Begoña Gómez, has not been able to overthrow him either after opening the door to his third resignation, now as President of the Government, in the letter to the citizens that he wrote , in his own handwriting, last Wednesday. Her unexpected decision, in another new and surprising twist in her political career, led the socialists to mobilize to try to prevent it. The federal committee of the PSOE last Saturday ended with a unanimous cry from the leadership and socialist militancy at the doors of Ferraz: “Pedro, stay.” Some detected too much euphoria and enthusiasm in the concentration of the crowd, when they thought it was, rather, a funeral. But in part it was that reaction that made Sánchez think that he was worth continuing. And start a new political life.
