The visit to Sarajevo, a year ago, was an emotional pinch for Pedro Sánchez. The 51-year-old Spanish Prime Minister and PSOE candidate for re-election arrived in the Bosnian capital on a tour of the Balkans. But years ago, at the end of the nineties, his political career took off in this city, when a very young Sánchez worked in the cabinet of Carlos Westendorp, high representative of the UN to rebuild the country after the war.
Traveling and working abroad was a decision he made once he finished his degree in Economics and completed his military service. He had joined the PSOE at the age of 21. He worked in a tax consultancy, in New York, and at the age of 26 he went to Brussels, where he did a master’s degree in economic policy, in French, and worked as an adviser to the Socialist group of the European Parliament.
The next step was Bosnia. There he calibrated the distance between the adviser and the one who decides. And he wanted to decide. He rejected an offer from the United Nations to go to East Timor and returned to Madrid to start a political career. He was hired by the Organization of Consumers and Users, due to his European experience. And in 2004 he was a councilor in Madrid, the first elected position.
At the same time, he had met Begoña Gómez, a director of a marketing company, with whom he married and has two daughters. “I fell madly in love, but it took a lot to convince her, even though in the end I was able to leave the toothbrush at her house!”, he explained to Bertín Osborne in a relaxed interview, in which he explained that as a teenager he danced breakdance, that he is a good caricaturist, and they shared, between laughs, even their strategies of young people to hook up. A middle-class child, he spoke of family summers in the Balearic Islands, or in Ireland to study English. It was at the end of 2015, he had been general secretary of the PSOE for 15 months and was on the rounds of entertainment programs to make himself known. He explained that he had played basketball with Estudiantes until the age of 21 and that he was a university professor, with an economic structure. The students called him the politician.
A year after that conversation, Sánchez left the leadership of the PSOE and his seat in Congress after being disowned by the party when he refused to facilitate the investiture of Rajoy, who had won the 2015 general elections and the 2016 repeat. He took his Peugeot and repeated the tour of the socialist federations to obtain support, as in 2014. And like then, he regained the leadership of the party. And in June 2018, based on a censure of Rajoy after the conviction of the PP for the Gürtel case, he was elected president of the Spanish Government.
With an atypical political career, full of obstacles that have given him a reputation as resilient, Sánchez has so far managed to fall straight. “I was educated in the culture of pressure with basketball, and I like it; I’m much better with pressure”, he says.
In a three-way game between the campaign, Moncloa and the presidency of the Council of the EU, he needs to fight the mental frame, reinforced by the polls, that the PP will win. And, once again, lift the flight.
