Pedro Sánchez and the Anti-Trump Left's Global Coalition | The Close Read Ep. 72

Europeans feel like they have been granted some insight into Donald Trump that has somehow escaped Americans. Like, don't you realize that he's profiting off of crypto? And the first thing you need to say to Europeans is that we all see the same Trump. And the difference between the way Americans view Trump and the way Europeans view Trump is not in our ideas of what constitutes good behavior or good statesmanship. It's in the nature of the the differences in the nature of the political situation in the United States, which Americans are inclined to view as an emergency. And they're inclined to view Trump as a person who, rightly or wrongly, might have a way to fix that emergency. Hello and welcome back to the Claremont Review of Books podcast. I'm your host Spencer Clavin, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and I'm enjoying reading through the summer 2026 issue of CRB with a few of the authors and editors of the issue. I'm joined today, it's always a great pleasure, repeat guest Christopher Caldwell, contributing editor of our own CRB, and we're here to talk about his piece Pedro Sánchez's Kingdom, Progressive Reign in Spain. Chris, welcome back to The Close Read. I'm so happy to be here, Spencer. I'm glad you're here, and I'm very interested to talk with you about this essay and about Spanish politics, in part because this has proven a very well-timed piece. The situation that you outline here, I think, has become more central, or at least it's moved into the news more since you wrote this, and CRB readers have kind of learned from you first about something that will continue to be of great interest, and that is the emergence of Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain, as a kind of leadership figure for what you call the global left. He's hugely popular, important for left-wing movements around the world. You begin this piece with an April summit of sorts, it's called the Global Progressive Mobilization, in which you write, Pedro Sánchez summoned the world's leftist statesmen. Yes, and that's just something that Sánchez kind of dreamed up in the course of the late winter. What, you know, what the piece is kind of about is a strategy that Sánchez has been pursuing. Sánchez has got himself, Sánchez has been in power for quite a while now in Spain. You know, he's been the head of the Spanish Socialist Party, which is called the Socialist and Labour Party of Spain, since 2014. He's been the Prime Minister since 2018. He's been the head of the Socialist International, which some listeners will be surprised to know still exists, since 2022. He doesn't face election until next year, but he's run into a lot of trouble. I'd say around three issues. One is immigration, which is unbelievably high in Spain, and Spaniards think it's too high. Two is the economy, which is what the, you know, the performance of which is what immigration was supposed to improve, you know. And third is corruption. Sánchez is caught in a number of scandals, and he is, so he finds himself trying to change the subject. And great politician that he is, he's landed on Donald Trump as his ticket out of this problem. Right, and in this way there's this bizarre double vision that seems to be emerging between Sánchez's almost heroic status among American left-wingers and left-wingers around the rest of the world, and Sánchez's actual popularity in Spain, which seems to be kind of abysmal. I was looking at a piece in The Guardian by a Spanish writer explaining to Guardian readers that maybe they shouldn't be so excited about this guy. So that's a remarkable kind of symptom of the way politics works, I think, in the digital age, among other things, that you can have this global persona that's kind of at odds with your actual record of governance. And then the pathologies that you describe in Spain are really interesting, too. I mean, you mentioned, first of all, that Spain is the most anti-American country in Europe. Can you say a little bit about why that is and then, you know, what they're going through at the moment? Yeah, well, you know, that's funny. I'd like to address that in just a sec, but I think since you bring up, you know, since you bring up our age and our internet age and how that affects the popularity of politicians, I do think that that's a really key part to this Sanchez story. You know, Sanchez is unpopular, but he's not that unpopular. And it's a funny thing. This is the, this system kind of rescues and gives a kind of a base to politicians who are really struggling. I would say that in countries like France and England, where people still retain the idea that the president is, or the head of government, whoever he happens to be, represents the whole country, you can really fall to sub-Nixonian levels. So I think that, you know, let's say, you know, Francois Hollande got down to really low in the polls. He was down at almost a single digits in the polls in France. Gordon Brown, in the old days, got, you know, down into the teens in England. That's really bad. But if you're in a really polarized society, it seems like your people are always going to stick to you. So Trump just doesn't seem like he's going to fall below 35%. There are enough people who are worried about the opposite poll to stick by him. And I think the same is, the same is true of Sanchez. Yeah, you gave an interview to El País, which is a major Spanish outlet, explaining Trump to the Spanish. Just as you've explained Spanish politics to us Americans, you're explaining American politics to the Spanish. And one of the things you say is, you know, Americans actually understand, for example, about Trump's corruption and the charges against him there. It's just that those who really are devoted to him consider other things more important. And it's very, very difficult. Maybe the Iran war, maybe the tariffs will kind of damage that. But there's this kind of core base. Yeah. I think that Europeans are, the best way to understand the way Europeans look at Trump's popularity in the United States is to think it's it's kind of a version of the of the Access Hollywood moment in the 2016 election, which is that the entire United States saw this vulgar tape of Donald Trump. And then for the next month or two, those who opposed Donald Trump started lecturing half the country about what had just happened, as if people hadn't seen it. And you wanted to say to those who were sort of like going into hysterics about this, yes, we we actually all saw that. We know exactly what's on that tape, you know. And I think that Europeans need to know this, to know this too. Europeans feel like they have been granted some insight into Donald Trump that has somehow escaped Americans. Like, don't you realize that he's profiting off of crypto? Or, you know, don't you realize that he called this woman a, you know, what just name a, you know, an epithet? And the first thing you need to say to Europeans, which is what I tried to say to this this interviewer from El Pais, is that we all see the same Trump. And the difference between the way Americans view Trump and the way Europeans view Trump is not in our ideas of what constitutes good behavior or good statesmanship. It's in the nature of the, the difference is in the nature of the political situation in the United States, which Americans are inclined to view as an emergency. And they're inclined to view Trump as a person who, rightly or wrongly, might have a way to fix that emergency. And I think that as, you know, and I think this is a different question that has nothing to do with Spain, as Trump has got distracted from that emergency in recent months. I think that's why his popularity has fallen. But I think that there's a, that Europeans in general have a very difficult and very distant way of understanding what's going on in the United States. Do you think that in Spain with Sanchez and in America with Trump, the key really is not about your evaluation of the man so much as where you think the emergency lies or what it is. In other words, what are you trying to stave off by accepting this not particularly ideal politician? Is that a fair way to put it? There are arguments on both sides. I mean, if I were making the judgment about Trump, I would say that there are some particular places where you can locate the emergency. One is the border. And, you know, people have a hard time understanding how worked up Americans are about the border. And the fact that Trump has been able to close it, or let's say keep it orderly, has won him a great deal of indulgence from the public. So in that case, it really is about the emergency. But, you know, when people try to take a different tack from Trump abroad, and here at Sanchez, this is kind of what my article is about, is the way Sanchez has tried to, let's just say, contrast himself with Trump as a way of distracting his public from what's going on in his own country. For these people, it really is about what Trump is doing. And I would say Mark Carney in Canada is an example of another way to play this game of casting yourself as the anti-Trump. But let's stick with Sanchez. You know, I mean, Sanchez too has a huge problem with immigration. Spain is a country with an extremely low birth rate. At the turn of the century, it had fewer than 40 million people. Now it's got about 50 million people. And they're all immigrants. It's got more than 10 million immigrants. It's 10 million foreign-born, let's say. Some of them have become, many of them have become, Spanish citizens. And so Sanchez doesn't know quite what to do about that. But he decided to try to turn this immigration into an advantage in early January of last year. And that's when he announced an amnesty for immigration. And the way he did it was by publicizing this in other Western countries, including the United States, making a big dramatic show of saying, Spain is a company open to immigration. And the reason he did it that way is because he was broadcasting into the news cycle that was coming out of Minnesota, concerning the ICE arrests and the raids and the shootings of protesters. That might actually be another example of this sort of miscalculation of what's going on in the United States. Because if you look at the United States, it did not, you know, I don't think that that was popular. It cost Trump some popularity in the polls. But it didn't really dent the base of people who are grateful for a stable border. But it looked that way among Sanchez's people, and the evidence is that it helped him quite a bit. And that is the context in which he decided to invite the leaders of the world's left, the so-called progressive mobilization, to come and meet him in Barcelona. It's interesting as you're talking, I'm noticing this distinction kind of emerging between things that might hurt a politician's popularity, that his opponents might be able to seize on, but that don't really land with the people who care about him most, with his base. Because they don't affect the things that those people care about most, right? So immigration for Trump would be an example of like, if he makes some mistakes there, he's got leeway, versus Iran, where, as you say, he made this promise not to do foreign wars, and the people who voted for him cared about that, and so that's more damaging to him. How would you say that distinction functions for Sanchez? So in other words, the people who are supporting him, are there kind of pain points where he might actually really suffer and not be able to use Trump as a foil or a decoy? Things that might threaten him in this, he has to call an election, as you point out, in the near future. So where would you say his pain points lie? Yeah, I don't, well, I mean, Spain is a very special country, and it's one of the things that makes it interesting to report from, which is that they had one of the most savage and bloody civil wars in the history of mankind less than a century ago, and the sort of fault lines that grew out of that civil war have not really moved. In fact, the Socialist Party of Sanchez and his predecessor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has really tried to polarize further. It's tried to repolarize a society that seemed to be heading towards a more forgive-and-forget approach about the civil war. So I think that Sanchez, as I was saying, has a lot of leeway with his base now. His base is only about a third of the country now. So it means that there's a space that's kind of opening up in the middle, and paradoxically, it's in the same way that there was with Trump. A lot of the real swing vote in the country is in, you know, recent immigrants, people who are not really dug in in some ancestral vision of Spain. But I would say that, you know, Sanchez has had a pretty good run. He's a really brilliant politician. And when he has been in trouble, he has proved himself, he's proved incredibly inventive about forming coalitions. And the most inventive thing he did after his re-election, after the, you know, no one thought that he could win when he ran for re-election in 2023. And indeed, he did not, and his coalition did not win outright. But they came close. He ran a rather brilliant campaign, and they came very close. And then Sanchez did something that no one really had considered within the realm of possibility, which is that he made a coalition with the conservative, kind of relatively free market part of the Catalan nationalist movement, a party called Junts, which is just taboo for the socialists in about a hundred different ways, you know, from basically calling for the breakup of the country to extolling the free market. But he did it, and he wound up trapping this party in his coalition, because you cannot break up a Spanish governing coalition unless you have a new constructive majority. This is, it's the matter of political science. But anyway, Sanchez has been able to do a very, he has pain points, but it's kind of hard to see where they are because he's been able to do such an astute job of reacting to political crises. On the subject of coalition building, and perhaps this is part of the skill that you're outlining here, you mentioned this effort to reinvigorate the tensions over the Spanish Civil War. And one of the most interesting pieces of your article to me is your observation that this makes Spain kind of the pioneer of woke in a certain weird way. This law, Zapatero, whom you mentioned, has this law of memoria historica. Sanchez adds one, memoria democratica, about high school education and how we can remember these central and divisive figures in history. And then you point out that this has divided the right in a very useful way for Sanchez. So there's now two parties, as I understand you, that could mount an opposition, but they're meaningfully distinct. We've got the Popular Party and Vox. Can you talk a little bit about them and kind of what the state of the right is? That's two very good subjects. I mean, the first is the way memory has been handled in Spain. And this actually has a lot to do with the United States. Coming out of the death of Francisco Franco, this was really the end of an era. In 1975, when Franco died, Franco was called a fascist, although he remained aloof from what happened in World War II. Germany and Italy aided his war effort in the 1930s. He observed this pretty strict neutrality at the end. But he was nonetheless a kind of a mid-century rightist. People still refer to him as a fascist. And so at the end of when he died, the country was in a very, let's just say, they were in a mood to turn the page on this. And so one of the very interesting things about Spanish polling over the last 50 years is almost everyone says they're on the left. If you do from a scale of one being on the left to ten being on the right, and people say, where do you stand on the political spectrum? People will say, I think the average is around 3.9. So Spaniards like to think of themselves as being on the left. However, they're not really on the left. And so after a period of socialist rule under Felipe González and others, the so-called Popular Party, which had the elements of the old Franco coalition, but also a lot of Reaganite free marketers, they ruled the country at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one. And Jose Maria Aznar was their great leader. And his idea, he had two main ideas. One was to break away from the influence of France and become a more important player in the American world. So Aznar was very close to Clinton. And the second idea that Aznar had was that Spain was going to become the center of the Spanish-speaking world, which sounds like it might go without saying, but it doesn't. Spain is far from the largest Spanish-speaking country. Mexico is much, much bigger. It was not at the time that Aznar made this resolution the home of most of the Spanish language elites of the world. You could almost say that Miami was in that role. But if you look at the way Spain has evolved lately, for example, when the United States captured Nicolás Maduro and you saw all these pictures from around the world of Venezuelans dancing in the street, notice how many of them were in Spain. The cameras would take you to Madrid, Barcelona. There are many cities in Spain that have huge Venezuelan populations. Anyway, that is the backdrop to what I'm going to say about memory. During that period, there was a real attempt to put the past behind them, and that was really what the popular party stood for. People tried to tar Aznar as a descendant of the Franco regime. Generally, people liked Aznar's project, which involved a considerable degree of putting that past behind them. But in 2004, Al-Qaeda, at a time when Spain was involved with the United States in the Iraq war, bombed four trains one morning at rush hour, killing hundreds of people. To the surprise of almost every observer, the country turned against Aznar. Rather than rallying behind the flag and saying, well, if Al-Qaeda is for that, we're for, you know, sort of like deepening our position in the war. The country really decided that Aznar had dragged them into an alliance that was endangering them to no particular purpose. There were elections coming up. Aznar's chosen successor was a guy named Mariano Rajoy, who eventually became prime minister, but he did not make it then. To everyone's surprise, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won the election and basically ruled Spain until the financial crisis, with a very, very, let's just say, culture war, left-wing culture war attitude towards Spain. And the attitude was basically that whatever the laws were in Spain at any given time were unduly influenced by the intimidation that resulted from having been made in the shadow of the Franco dictatorship. The country actually needed to be protected against the free exchange of ideas. And so you had all these units in which, you know, Francoism was taught in schools. You had this wholesale purge of statues and street names and names of institutions that had to do not just with Franco, but with anyone who had occupied an important position in Spanish life in the middle of the century. And, you know, that is essentially the politics that Sánchez has run. And as you say, he's taken it a bit further. I mean, there's now an idea of, you know, of Franco. The old idea of Franco used to be kind of a tragic one. It was that, you know, yeah, there's this terrible civil war that was fought, but it was fought at a time when, you know, communism was on the rise and all of the, you know, all of the countries that are, all of the governments that came to power in Europe in the middle of the century were kind of unsavory in one way or another. So we'll learn from that history. That was not, that's not been the idea of Zapatero and Sánchez. It's been, you know, the idea that the Franco government was the sort of, was sort of the equivalent of Hitler, you know. And so it's been a very, there's been a dramatic closing of, you know, freedom of, let's just say, the so-called Overton window has grown as narrow in Spain as it is anywhere else in the world. We will be, I'm sure, familiar with some of the dynamics you've just outlined in America, especially the idea that this painful part of our history needs to be moved front and center of our account and also made completely, completely anathema, excised from every part of it. There's almost a theologization of it, yeah. Yep, yep. And you compare it with Jim Crow in terms of the role it plays. Franco and Jim Crow kind of have the same status for this left project in Spain, which leads me to the question of the reaction that might emerge. Because in America, wokeness has both, I think, strengthened a kind of populist right in some ways. It's made the case for Trump and Trumpism stronger. It's also, however, persisted and mutated in forms that are only now starting to take shape. I'm thinking of Zoran Mamdani, I'm thinking of the kind of spate of young, energetic DSA candidates we're seeing. Are there instructive features of the way this is playing out in Spain for us? Is it totally different over there? Or what exactly would you say is the way that the, as it were, anti-woke Spanish movement, do you think it'll succeed? Do you think that this is kind of the precursor to a populist uprising? Or is it something that has really taken hold and will actually become the accepted narrative? I don't think the United States is a particularly good comparison for Spain. I think a better comparison would be like a non-presidential system where you have multiple parties that need to be brought together in order to topple a government. And I would say in that respect, Spain is very different from other European countries. In most of Europe, and by the way, there is a reaction building. So I have said to you that I think that Sanchez is doing pretty well considering the problems he has. He's got his base of 35 percent. That's enough to keep you in power, you know, if you have a lot of, you know, members of Parliament who don't want to be out of a job, okay? But it's not enough to win you an election. And I think that almost everyone in almost every poll is showing a pretty powerful victory for a conservative coalition next year. That coalition as it exists now is the old Partido Popular, which has kind of been discredited over several elections by being a sort of a milk toasty version of, you know, of the old Aznar party. Rajoy, whom I mentioned, was Aznar's chosen successor. He did a pretty brilliant job of managing Spain's path out of the finance crisis, which was probably more serious in Spain than it was in any European country outside of Greece. But he didn't really have much of a vision beyond sort of like balancing the country's books. So the Popular Party is kind of soft. They had a very disappointing election last time. There is, however, a new and more Trumpian and more immigration focused party called Vox, which is growing. And Vox is now, there have been a number of state elections in which Vox has got record turnouts and record numbers of seats. When I say state elections, I mean, you know, elections or autonomias. The question is, you know, what is Vox's relationship to the Popular Party? And here, I think the Spanish right is in a much stronger position than, say, France or Germany, where it's in the culture of the country's right to repudiate its own hard right. And so it's sort of like an autoimmune disorder in the right wing part of the political spectrum. Spain does not have that. The Popular Party is not crazy about Vox. It's a little bit embarrassed by Vox. But they're going to make a coalition with Vox. And I don't think that anyone doubts that. So I think that Spain, in that sense, is in a position more like the United States than like its European neighbors. That is, it has a right that actually can take power. Remarkable. Well, I think in both cases, it'll be fascinating to watch what transpires. I'm going to just mention the name of this article one more time, because we're out of time. I've got more questions I'd like to ask you, but we'll have to take them offline. This piece is called Pedro Sanchez's Kingdom, Progressive Reign in Spain, by Christopher Caldwell, our contributing editor. And you can find it in the Summer 2026 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. I believe there are plans to bring it out from behind the paywall in our abundant generosity and munificence. You will be able to read this for free. But there are lots of other articles that you'll want to pay for by going to claremontreviewofbooks.com and becoming a subscriber, where we'd be very glad to have you. And you can also go to claremontinstitute.substack.com to get extra episodes of this podcast and others. Chris Caldwell, thank you very much for joining The Close Read. Thank you, Spencer.