Spain, the eurozone’s fourth largest country and economy, after Germany, France and Italy, is by many standards irresponsibly governed by an erratic demagogue. His wife and his brother have both been sent for trial in corruption cases and he is ostentatiously out of step with the Western alliance. The economy enjoys a 2.4 per cent growth rate, which is approximately three times the anaemic eurozone average, and it is doing particularly well in the growth of skilled and professional occupations. Spain has benefited from the fact that nearly 13 per cent of its GDP is derived from tourism and this is an industry that can be largely staffed with underpaid migrant workers.
This policy has enabled the Spanish Government to conduct a ludicrous masquerade of being Europe’s centre of humanist and compassionate government by accepting such migrants more freely than the other Mediterranean countries in Europe. It can do that because the French had to accept an inordinate number of Algerians in 1962 when France granted that country its independence and it admitted about a tenth of Algeria’s population to France, Europeans and the Arabs who had supported the French colonial enterprise there. Italy was relatively late organising itself to limit immigration and the principal sources of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to Europe are more distant from Spain and so have been relatively late getting there.
Despite the posturing and histrionics of the Spanish Government as being more generous to these unfortunate migrants than the other major European countries, we saw with the sudden arrival of 60,000 Moroccans who swam to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on July 30-31, 2026, how tentative and conditional is the Spanish Government’s masquerade as Europe’s friend of the international disadvantaged.
The decisive turning point in Spanish affairs in this century occurred on March 11, 2004, three days before the general elections that were expected to re-elect the centre-right government. On that day, a terrorist attack killed 193 people and wounded 1,900 others. The terrorist group ETA was initially blamed, but when it became known that Islamists were involved, the Spanish Left was able to blame Spain’s support for the Iraq war for the terrible incident. The socialist leader, the egregious José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, organised demonstrations on the day before the elections and on election day, blaming the government for this tragedy. With this gambit, Zapatero won and a disaster of misgovernment began.
Zapatero allied himself with the Left and with the regional separatists in Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque provinces and made humiliating concessions to the terrorists. His foreign policy had been foreshadowed when, as leader of the opposition, he remained seated at the October 12, 2003 military parade as the American flag, among those of other NATO allies, passed by. He encouraged separatist movements in different parts of Spain and passed the “Historical Memory Law” which placed the entire blame for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), in which about 500,000 Spaniards died, on the winning side, while completely exonerating the Left which originated the war.
The present Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, is the heir of Zapatero and frequently conveys the impression of being a pathological narcissist. He gained office through a parliamentary coup and not an election and is at the head of a ragtag coalition of communists, separatists, terrorists and political eccentrics. He became cloyingly friendly with Iran, China and Venezuela, and Spain became a clangorous dissident within NATO. Russia was permitted to support the cause of Catalonian independence, and the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s national court, is investigating claims that Venezuelan oil money helped fund Sánchez’s party, allegations the party denies. Sánchez is desperately seeking to establish a name for himself as the head of the international Left and is ostentatiously admired by the Iranian and Chinese governments and by the Palestinians and the Latin American Left.
Sánchez is naturally trying to exploit the unpopularity of Trump in Spain by denying the use of American bases in that country, Rota and Morón in southern Spain, for supplying its Middle Eastern forces in the Iranian conflict, and in various rhetorical flourishes. Trump has not ignored him: at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8, 2026 he dismissed Spain as a lost cause, instructed his treasury secretary to cut off all trade with the country and said the Spanish were “great people, but they don’t have great leadership”. Sánchez is expected to be sent packing in the general election due in 2027, but no one rules out the possibility of his attempting to reinflate his electoral fortunes and distract from the criminal charges enshrouding his family with further lurches to the Left.
Democracy and the constitutional monarchy that followed the death of General Franco in 1975, after a stern but rather successful dictatorship of 36 years, have been the first successful democratic era in Spanish history. The Sánchez interlude of profound corruption and contemptible demagogy is the severest challenge of the post-Franco era, although, as has been mentioned, the economy has not done badly and a disaster in public accounts has been prevented by shortchanging the Spanish defence budget. If Sánchez is not evicted by the voters in 2027, the United States may be expected to press for Spain’s suspension from NATO, and the European Union will have to consider seriously if Spain remains an acceptable euro member. Most Spaniards are politically sensible and they should prevail, but an important turning point in Western European history is coming in Spain.