In post-pandemic political Europe, few leaders embody the logic of resistance as a method as clearly as Pedro Sánchez. Cornered by an unprecedented accumulation of judicial scandals, internal complaints and electoral setbacks, the head of the Spanish Government has opted for a strategy that no longer hides his nature: clinging to power tooth and nail, even when social support erodes and the regenerationist promise that brought him to La Moncloa fades.
The early elections in Extremadura were the first relevant electoral test since this wear and tear became structural. And the result was eloquent. The PSOE suffered a severe fall: it lost eight seats and was reduced to 20 deputies in a region that for decades was one of its historical strongholds. It is a political defeat of magnitude, which confirms the demobilization of the progressive electorate and the fatigue in the face of a government permanently on the defensive.
However, the decisive fact is not only the socialist fall, but also who capitalizes on that decline. The Popular Party wins the election with 27 seats – even losing one compared to the previous period – and becomes the main beneficiary of the erosion of the PSOE. Vox, on the other hand, although it grows strongly in arithmetic terms (it goes from 5 to 13 seats), remains politically diluted: it adds, but does not order; advances, but does not lead. He needs the PP as much as the PP needs him, and he cannot even convert a hyper-personalized campaign around Santiago Abascal into real political centrality.
This distribution of damage is key to understanding Sánchez’s logic.
The president observes a fragmented map: the left loses, the traditional right picks up that vote and the extreme right fails to hegemonize the unrest. In this scenario, resisting becomes a rational, although politically corrosive, option. Sánchez governs less and less by social legitimacy and more and more by institutional engineering, tight pacts and a surgical reading of other people’s weaknesses.
The problem is that this resistance is based on increasingly fragile ground. For months, the Spanish Government has been surrounded by scandals that affect both the core of power and the party apparatus. The judicial investigation against his wife, Begoña Gómez, for alleged influence peddling and misuse of public resources, broke a key symbolic boundary: for the first time, the president’s intimate environment was formally under suspicion. Added to this is the accusation of his brother, David Sánchez, accused of having acceded to a public position tailored to his needs in a socialist administration.
In parallel, the PSOE faces its own internal crisis. Former minister José Luis Ábalos, a central figure of the first Sanchismo, and his former advisor Koldo García are accused of alleged illegal commissions in health contracts during the pandemic. The fall of Santos Cerdán, until recently Secretary of Organization of the party, completed the picture: corruption at the heart of the apparatus, in the same terrain where the Government had built one of its most successful management stories. To this were added complaints of sexual harassment carried out by party leaders, managed with clumsiness and silence, in open contradiction with the feminist discourse that Sánchez projected inside and outside of Spain.
Faced with this scenario, the presidential response was to close ranks and deny the damage. There was no deep self-criticism or high-impact political gestures. Instead, the narrative of the siege prevailed: politicized judges, complaints promoted by far-right organizations, coordinated media campaigns. That narrative retains effectiveness in the hard core, but accelerates the flight of the moderate voter and deepens progressive disaffection.
Here the Argentine mirror appears. The drift of the Sánchez government is increasingly reminiscent of the Alberto Fernández cycle. A progressivism that came to power promising moderation and regeneration, and ended up trapped in scandals, denial and political paralysis. In Argentina, this collapse triggered a crisis of representation that opened the door to an abrupt change in the system and the rise of Javier Milei, an outsider who capitalized on widespread fatigue.
Spain, for now, seems to be going down a different path.
The erosion of the PSOE does not push mostly towards Vox, but towards a centrist and classic right, embodied by the PP. This difference explains, in part, Sánchez’s obstinacy to resist: his fall does not enable a leap into the void, but rather a conventional alternation. But the risk is similar. When politics is reduced to enduring, when governing is confused with resistance and denial replaces responsibility, the damage stops being personal and becomes institutional.
Pedro Sánchez seems convinced that power is not abandoned: it is defended. Even against the polls, even against moral erosion. Extremadura showed that the PSOE is falling, that the PP is picking up on that collapse and that Vox, despite growing, is unable to take ownership of the discontent. Sánchez reads that map as an invitation to continue. The question is no longer whether it can resist until 2027, but what remains of the system when resistance becomes the only way to govern.
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