For many on the global left, Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, has emerged as a progressive superhero. He has not only championed liberal positions on immigration, renewable energy and civil rights, but he has also stood up to President Trump over tariffs, the abduction of Venezuela’s leader and now, most prominently of all, the war in Iran.
But as liberal leaders gather to venerate Mr. Sánchez at a global progressive summit in Barcelona, they are inhabiting an alternate Spanish universe where Mr. Trump is widely seen as coming to Mr. Sánchez’s rescue by engaging him in international quarrels that distract from the Spanish leader’s domestic problems.
Far from a political threat, Mr. Trump is seen here as a life preserver in a sea of Spanish scandals and setbacks aiding the political survival of Europe’s most accomplished escape artist.
Mr. Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister since 2018, is better known at home for his willingness to say and do anything to stay in power. His liberal backers applaud him for his deftness in wielding a political dagger — a skill that, they say, is in short global supply and is necessary to defy the rise of the right.
“He needs to be a great prime minister in this vital time,” said Carmen Calvo, Mr. Sánchez’s former deputy prime minister. With a general election due by next year, his aides said in interviews, he will go to any legitimate length to stay in power and prevent the country falling to the far right, 50 years after the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. When it came to doing what was necessary to survive, Ms. Calvo called him “a very flexible leader.”
But for some, Mr. Sánchez has been too flexible.
He has gone back on his promise never to strike amnesty deals with separatist parties in order to secure a parliamentary majority. He has governed without a budget for three years despite once saying an inability to pass a budget should trigger elections. And most dangerously, his critics say, he has strategically picked fights with Spain’s surging far right — a move that helped to motivate exasperated liberals into voting for him again, but also bestowed the far right with a legitimacy that they previously did not have.
But the criticism that has perhaps most dogged Mr. Sánchez is his association with disgraced former Socialist party officials whom his enemies have termed the “Peugeot Gang.”
In October 2016, as Mr. Sánchez embarked on a primary campaign that began his remarkable ascent to the top of the Spanish government, he set out in his black Peugeot with three political allies. He cheerily promised in a social media post to “take my car to once again to travel to all corners of Spain and listen.”
The road trip became central to Mr. Sánchez’s political mythology.
Yet a decade later, with his travel buddies all facing corruption accusations and constant attacks from conservatives, the trip seems to have left him carsick.
One of the accused is José Luis Ábalos, a former infrastructure minister and top party official, who is currently jailed and on trial for receiving bribes, among other accusations that he denies. When officials raided his home, they said they found an external hard drive, containing possible evidence, hidden in the pants of a woman who had worked as a pornographic actress and who Mr. Ábalos had asked to walk his dog, according to a police report reviewed by The New York Times.
Mr. Ábalos’s right-hand man, Koldo García, a former bouncer and driver turned government fixer, is accused of accepting envelopes filled with bribes for the minister, and is also in jail. He also denies the charges.
Rounding out the Peugeot group is Santos Cerdán, who replaced Mr. Ábalos in 2021 as the party’s second in command and was the chief negotiator for Mr. Sánchez in cutting a deal with Catalan separatists that allowed him to form a government. Mr. Cerdán is under investigation by prosecutors on allegations of accepting kickbacks from a construction company — an accusation that he denies.
None of the accusations have personally implicated Mr. Sánchez, who came to power as an anticorruption crusader, though he has taken some responsibility for trusting his old associates.
“I apologize,” Mr. Sánchez said, during a somber June 2025 news conference.
But that did not end Mr. Sánchez’s woes.
In December, the re-emergence of sexual harassment accusations against a top party official, which the official denied, threatened to alienate female voters pivotal for Mr. Sánchez’s chances of re-election. Then this past week, a judge requested formal charges against Mr. Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, in a long-running influence-peddling case.
His wife denies the charges, and Mr. Sánchez has denounced them as the product of a mudslinging operation, in which accusations from his right-wing opponents prompt investigations by sympathetic conservative judges, which are then amplified in conservative media. Mr. Sánchez once contemplated quitting in response to the accusations against his wife, lamenting in public that she was being targeted simply because she was his spouse. (“I am a man,” he said, “deeply in love.”)
The scandals all came amid an avalanche of other bad news, including a national electricity blackout, an erosion of Mr. Sanchez’s parliamentary majority, a housing crisis and deadly floods in Valencia, where angry mudslinging locals forced him to flee during his visit there.
Despite having the fastest-growing economy in the European Union, Spain has become increasingly polarized, with much of the animus centered on Mr. Sánchez. “Sánchez is a son of a bitch” is a common, and unprompted, chant at movie theaters, soccer stadiums and nightclubs populated by right-wing youth.
In February, supporters of the famously dashing prime minister noted that he looked terrible — his face gaunt, his eyes sunken. “Eat a little something,” shouted an older woman he met while shaking hands in the southern city of Jaén. “You’re too skinny,” she added.
To escape political trouble in the past, Mr. Sánchez often turned to a scare tactic. For years, analysts say, he essentially picked fights with the rising right-wing nationalist party Vox — which opposes L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is hostile to Islam and wants to repatriate immigrants — on culturally explosive issues. By doing so, Mr. Sánchez sought to shake dormant left-wing supporters out of their slumber, but also to weaken the mainstream conservative Popular Party by diverting its harder-line members to Vox.
The tactics worked in 2023, when Mr. Sánchez, all but counted out, managed to keep power after national elections. But since then, and especially when the scandals broke, liberal voters have seemed less motivated, and more exasperated by Mr. Sánchez. Some former allies worried that in the long term, his push for survival would increase the chances of Spain one day turning to the far right.
But then, Mr. Trump appeared, extending insults like a lifeline.
As the two engaged in a tit for tat over tariffs, NATO, Palestine, Greenland and Venezuela, Mr. Sánchez appeared to gain strength from each interaction, which helped to distract from his domestic crises. Mr. Sánchez’s advisers shrugged off Mr. Trump’s threats of punitive tariffs against Spain because the country, as a member of the European Union’s trading bloc, is difficult to single out. For Mr. Sánchez, the threats from Mr. Trump were all upside.
Then the war in Iran gave Mr. Sánchez an even greater platform upon which to stand up to Mr. Trump. He was, among Europe’s leaders, one of the first and most strident critics of Mr. Trump’s attacks on Iran. He accused the U.S. president of breaking with international law. He denied American bombers the right to use Spanish air bases to attack Iran. He did not think much of America’s declaration of a truce. “The Government of Spain,” he said, “will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.”
Now, Mr. Sanchez’s poll numbers are up, and he appears to be reveling in the moment.
On the day of recent anti-Trump protests worldwide, he posted a video of himself, looking haler and biking in a Make Science Great Again cap.
He appears to be turning to new allies. President Xi Jinping of China said that China and Spain were on “the right side of history” when Mr. Sánchez visited Beijing this past week.
And when Pope Leo XIV recently got into it with Mr. Trump, Spain’s prime minister made sure he stayed in the fray, offering backup to the pontiff with a biblical reference that, some believed, could apply to Mr. Sánchez as well.
“For they have sown the wind,” he wrote, “and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
Carlos Barragán and José Bautista contributed reporting.
Jason Horowitz is the Madrid bureau chief for The Times, covering Spain, Portugal and the way people live throughout Europe.
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