Pedro Sánchez’s Weird Socialist Experiment Must End with Ceuta
hen Pedro Sánchez walked into La Moncloa in June 2018, he sold himself as the man who would clean up Spain. His predecessor, Mariano Rajoy, had just been removed in the country’s first successful no-confidence motion after a massive corruption scandal poisoned the Popular Party’s credibility to govern. Sánchez’s PSOE held just 84 of 350 seats, yet he assembled 180 votes with an extraordinary coalition of leftists, Basque and Catalan nationalists and others. The promise was to root out corruption and bring ‘regeneration’ to Spain’s exhausted political system.
Eight years of Sanchismo, however, have made Spain look less regenerated than even more exhausted. In July, 69.1 per cent of Spaniards told the state-run Centre for Sociological Research (CIS) that they had little or no confidence in Sánchez, a rather unsurprising finding given the scale of corruption in which his circles have become mired. His former transport minister José Luis Ábalos was sentenced in June to 24 years and three months in prison for corruption offences. Sánchez’s brother David was convicted in July of administrative misconduct and barred from public office for nine years, while his wife, Begoña Gómez, is set to face a jury trial on influence-peddling and embezzlement charges, which she denies.
To top all of that, there is now Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in North Africa of roughly 84,000 residents living with the aftermath of an unprecedented mass invasion of more than 80,000 illegal migrants from Morocco at the end of July. Thousands still remain in Ceuta to this day, fuelling a deteriorating security, public-health and political crisis. Sánchez himself claimed at the beginning of August that the situation was under Madrid’s control. Locals protesting for a third consecutive day and attempting to drive out illegal migrants themselves do not agree with him. Ceuta is the end product of Pedro Sánchez’s weird socialist experiment.
Remaking Spain under Sanchismo
Over the past eight years, Spain has been used as a laboratory for social transformation in a country historically and deeply shaped by Catholicism. Sánchez’s governments have deliberately pushed the state into some of the most fundamental questions traditionally governed by religious, familial and biological understandings: the beginning and end of life, the meaning of sex and gender, and the authority of parents over their children.
The trajectory has been clear for years: euthanasia was legalized in 2021; in 2023, abortion rules were expanded so that 16- and 17-year-olds could terminate pregnancies without parental consent, while the mandatory three-day reflection period was abolished. The same year, Spain adopted one of Europe’s most permissive gender-identity regimes: anyone over 16 may request a change of registered sex without medical or psychological evidence, 14- and 15-year-olds can do so with their legal representatives, and 12- and 13-year-olds may seek judicial authorization.
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