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If Americans do not want to see their country become another nation drifting toward twenty-first-century socialism, the lesson is right before their eyes.
Pedro Sánchez used to present himself abroad as a modern social democrat, a European progressive committed to climate action, gender equality, and multilateralism. That image was carefully cultivated. The reality of his government in Spain is quite different: a systematic weakening of democratic checks and balances, alliances with parties that serve as the political arm of a terrorist organization, governing agreements with communists, parliamentary deals with separatist parties that have betrayed Spain, a foreign policy subservient to Morocco’s interests, and an increasingly authoritarian style of government resembling the institutional capture practiced by Chavista regimes in Latin America. What is at stake is not simply left-wing policy. It is the transformation of a constitutional democracy into a system in which the law is bent to ensure one man’s survival in power—a regime change from liberal democracy to Bolivarian dictatorship.
Years ago, I warned my fellow Spaniards that Sánchez was following the same iter criminis—the sequence of steps leading to a crime—that Hugo Chávez had followed in Venezuela. In my articles, I called him “Hugo Sánchez.” Spaniards who read my columns at latribunadelpaisvasco.com thought I was exaggerating. Today, they are horrified to see how accurate my predictions have proved to be.
Sánchez became secretary-general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) through a primary election in which, I contend, he committed fraud. Once he had secured control of his party, he reached La Moncloa, the Spanish prime minister’s official residence, in 2018 through a vote of no confidence based on falsehoods. Once in power, he could have chosen a coalition with a centrist party or with a communist party. He chose the communists and the political arm of a terrorist organization as his partners.
His survival in office has depended on successive agreements with forces that reject the constitutional order. The most serious is his relationship with EH Bildu, which I regard as ETA’s political arm. Its predecessor political movement had been outlawed until, in my view, former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pressured the Constitutional Court to allow its legalization. Sánchez’s government has progressively normalized Bildu and facilitated the release of hundreds of terrorists convicted of blood crimes.
The second pillar of his political survival has been the Catalan separatist parties. The amnesty law benefiting those responsible for the illegal 2017 independence referendum and related offenses was not an act of national reconciliation. It was the explicit price of seven parliamentary votes needed to keep Sánchez in power.
Spain’s relationship with Morocco under Sánchez has been marked by previously unthinkable concessions. The first was his abrupt reversal of Spain’s traditional position on Western Sahara, effectively supporting Morocco’s annexation of the territory. His government’s acquiescence in, and assistance with, what I consider Morocco’s recent invasion of Ceuta marks another milestone in this submission. Along the way have come repeated concessions within the European Union allowing Moroccan products to enter European markets to the detriment of Spanish farmers and fishermen. I have no doubt that Sánchez and certain ministers are being blackmailed by Morocco following the compromise of their mobile phones. In my view, the extent of these concessions suggests that they have something criminal and deeply embarrassing to conceal.
But Sánchez is not content merely to betray Spain. He wants to turn it into a submissive nation. To achieve this, as I have argued, he has copied the modus operandi, the iter criminis, employed by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela twenty years earlier—a process that transformed Venezuela into a dictatorship presiding over an impoverished population.
The method of transforming a democracy into a dictatorship is no longer the brutal military coup of decades past. It is subtler and therefore more effective. It can be summarized in several stages: permanent moral polarization, institutional colonization, violations of the law enabled by politicized courts, control of the public narrative through the media, alliances with anti-system forces, and the normalization of exceptional measures.
This process does not require suspending elections or shutting down Parliament. It is enough to hollow out the institutions designed to restrain executive power, buy political support with public resources—I have always maintained that buying votes with taxpayers’ money is the most extreme form of corruption—and keep a sufficiently large segment of the population mobilized by fear of “fascism.” The result resembles the Bolivarian regimes more than a traditional European democracy.