Accustomed to great comebacks, the president of the Spanish government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, evaluates whether he once again has a chance of overcoming an adverse context, which was precipitated by the opening of a investigation into his wife for alleged corruption.
“I learned to work hard until the referee whistles the end of the match,” said the head of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), a great basketball fan, in an autobiography titled “Manual of Resistance.”
He set the deadline himself, announcing by surprise this Wednesday that on Monday he will say whether he should “continue at the head of the government or renounce this high honor.”
With a seductive, affable and telegenic smile, the president – nicknamed “El Guapo” at the beginning of his career – is a regular at plot twists, which have allowed him to turn around difficult situations on more than one occasion.
Born on February 29, 1972 in Madrid, to a civil servant mother and a businessman father, he studied Economics in Madrid and Brussels. He concluded his studies with a controversial doctorate at a private university in Madrid, accused of having plagiarized his thesis, something he denies.
A PSOE militant since adolescence, a then almost unknown Sánchez became its general secretary in 2014 after the first primaries held in this centenary formation.
Two years later, however, he would receive a severe setback when, after achieving the worst electoral results in the party’s history, He was ousted from the socialist leadership due to an internal rebellion.
But thanks to the support of the militants, he returned with a bang seven months later, after having campaigned in his car throughout Spain with a handful of faithful to seduce the grassroots socialists, who would bring him back to the head of the party.
coup d’effect
This tenacity would bring him to power in June 2018 after a new coup d’état. Bringing together the entire left, together with the Basque and Catalan independentists, He managed to overthrow the conservative Mariano Rajoy, weakened by a corruption scandal, with a motion of censure and become president of the government.
The lack of a stable majority ended up forcing him to call two consecutive legislative elections in 2019, in which he won. Finally, he decided to form a coalition government with his former close enemies from the radical left of Podemos, with whom he managed to stay in power.
Despite governing as a minority, during his mandate managed to promote a vast range of reformssuch as the increase of almost 50% in the minimum wage, a reform of the labor market and pensions or the law that rehabilitates the memory of the victims of the Civil War (1936-1939) and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939- 1975).
Pedro Sánchez and King Felipe VI, in a ceremony in Madrid. Left for dead politically after a left-wing debacle in the local elections of May 28, Sánchez, one of the few socialists at the head of a European government, took a risk and immediately called general elections in which he came second, behind his conservative rival, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
But he multiplied the conversations to form a majority after the failure of the right-wing leader in his attempt to be sworn in as president of the government.
And finally this former member of the cabinet of the UN high representative in Bosnia, seen as skilled and pragmatic, managed to be re-elected in November by Parliament in exchange for important concessions to regional parties.
The main one was to promote an amnesty law for pro-independence supporters prosecuted by justice, mainly for their involvement in the attempted secession of Catalonia in 2017, which he opposed in the past.
