For more than a year, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain has positioned himself as the leader of Europe’s left-wing resistance to President Trump.
As Mr. Trump scaled up deportations, Mr. Sanchez gave undocumented migrants a pathway to residency. As the president championed American tech companies, Mr. Sánchez sought to restrict them. And this past weekend, Mr. Sánchez refused to let American warplanes use Spain as a launchpad for strikes on Iran, leading Mr. Trump to threaten to end trade with Spain.
On Wednesday, those tensions came to a head as Mr. Sánchez gave a special address to the nation in which he condemned the campaign against Iran and reiterated his refusal to participate despite Mr. Trump’s threats of economic retaliation.
“We are not going to be accomplices to something that is bad for the world, simply because of fear of reprisals from some,” Mr. Sánchez said in the televised speech.
“It’s not even clear what the goals are of those who launched the first attack,” Mr. Sánchez added, referring to the United States and Israel.
Mr. Sánchez’s address from the Moncloa Palace in Madrid escalated the standoff between Mr. Trump and his most vocal European critic, who has sought a path different from the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, who issued a joint statement promising to help in defensive actions against Iran.
The speech came less than a day after Mr. Trump held a freewheeling briefing in the Oval Office, during which he threatened to inflict economic pain on Spain and dismissed Spanish restrictions on U.S. warplanes.
“We could use the base if we want,” Mr. Trump said. “We could just fly in and use it.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France called Mr. Sánchez on Wednesday to express solidarity, the French presidency said.
The contretemps between Washington and Madrid is the latest example of how Mr. Sánchez, facing political strife at home, has sought to distinguish his policies from those of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Sánchez has lamented Mr. Trump’s “unjustified and unfair” tariffs. He has described Mr. Trump’s plans to move Palestinians from Gaza as “immoral” and described Israel’s conduct there as “genocide.”
Spain, alone among NATO members, rejected Mr. Trump’s demand that they spend 5 percent of their budget on defense, with Mr. Sánchez calling the idea “incompatible with our worldview.” In July, he buddied up with some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent critics, including Brazil’s president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.
Mr. Sánchez has also implicitly criticized Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigrants — “Some leaders have chosen to hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel,” he wrote in a Times essay in February — and called the American abduction of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, a “terrible precedent” that promoted the “law of the jungle.”
For Mr. Sánchez, Mr. Trump is not only an ideological foe but also a useful foil as the prime minister faces growing domestic problems.
Opinion polling shows that Mr. Sánchez is seen unfavorably by more than half the country. He controls less than half the seats in the Spanish Parliament, hasn’t passed a budget in years, is losing regional elections and enduring corruption scandals. Mr. Sánchez has turned to foreign policy, Pablo Simón, a political analyst, said, “to gain political leverage within Spain.”
Mr. Trump’s reaction to Spain’s restrictions on U.S. warplanes, and the global attention it attracted, was “exactly what Sánchez wanted,” said Ramón González Férriz, an author and a columnist at El Confidencial, a Spanish news website. “He has been looking to create an open confrontation with Donald Trump,” who is unpopular in Spain, Mr. González Férriz added.
Mr. Sánchez’s track record has also made him a hero to the global left. The left-wing Italian newsmagazine L’Espresso called him 2025’s person of the year, and Britain’s left-leaning New Statesman magazine called him a “left-wing icon.”
The Spanish left has long had an ambiguous relationship with the United States, showing significant opposition to joining NATO in 1986. In 2004, the Spanish prime minister at the time, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, became a leftist hero when he pulled troops from Iraq. There was a history, Mr. González Férriz said, of Spanish leftists refusing to be “vassals of America.”
For Mr. Sánchez, in office since 2018, an assertion of independence was also a political necessity. His anti-Trump positions give his Socialist party a chance to shore up their base and ward off challenges from far-left rivals.
Still, there are political risks. Some analysts have questioned whether, given Mr. Trump’s renewed threats against Spain, Mr. Sánchez’s opposition would eventually cause real economic pain.
It also makes Mr. Sánchez vulnerable to criticism from the right-wing Spanish opposition, which said this week that Mr. Sánchez was sacrificing Spain’s international reputation for domestic gain. “In trying to win a few votes at home,” said Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Spanish Popular Party, “we cannot put at risk our security.”
The Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Saar, took a similar line, questioning whether Mr. Sánchez was on “the ‘right side’ of history.”
Carlos Barragán contributed reporting from Madrid, and Ana Castelain from Paris.
Jason Horowitz is the Madrid bureau chief for The Times, covering Spain, Portugal and the way people live throughout Europe.
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