Pedro Sánchez Has Lost the Spanish Public, and the Government's Own Pollster Shows It
I’ve spent years arguing that Spain gets written off too cheaply. The declinist take on Madrid — permanent stagnation, a country that never recovered from 2008 — has been wrong for most of a decade, and the people repeating it now are still wrong. The economy is growing at more than twice the eurozone rate. Employment keeps setting records. Tourism receipts are absurd. The public deficit is under control in a way France would envy. I’m not going to pretend the headline numbers are fake, because they aren’t.
But a government can preside over a growing economy and still lose the country. That is what has happened here, and it happened on the three questions this government chose to own.
Not gradually. Not because of a hostile press. On its own terms, by its own instruments, in front of its own pollster.
The Growth Is Real. Ask Who Has It.
Here’s the test that matters: when the aggregate improves, who ends up holding the improvement?
In Spain the answer is legible in a single comparison. In the twelve months tracked to last September, Madrid province issued roughly 17,000 new-build permits while adding about 43,000 households. Barcelona issued around 11,000 against 18,000. That gap is not a forecast or a model. It’s arithmetic, and it compounds every quarter it isn’t closed. House prices are rising 12 to 13 per cent a year, the fastest pace since before the last bubble, except this time nobody overbuilt anything. Rental listings have fallen by roughly three-fifths nationally since the 2023 housing law imposed caps in designated stressed zones — a law that was this government’s signature intervention in this exact market.
Productivity per worker has barely moved since 2019. GDP per capita lags the headline because the population is growing faster than the output is. Unemployment remains the highest rate in the European Union.
And the CIS — the state polling institute, run by a Sánchez appointee, the single most PSOE-friendly instrument in Spanish public life — has now recorded housing as the country’s number one problem for well over a year and a half, at the highest readings in its history, touching half of all respondents. That number isn’t opposition propaganda. It’s the government measuring the temperature of its own patient and writing down the fever.
A Million People Applied. The Government Expected Half That.
The extraordinary regularisation was approved by royal decree in January and closed at the end of June. Ministers estimated it would reach around 500,000 people. More than a million applied.
Sit with that gap, because it’s the whole argument.
Either the government did not know how many people were living in Spain without status — off by a factor of two, in a country of forty-nine million — or it knew and said something else. There is no third option that flatters anyone. Whichever it is, the regularisation is not evidence of a policy working. It’s a receipt for a mechanism that stopped working years earlier, issued after the fact, by the people who were supposed to be running it.
Then there’s the route. Congress had already voted down the regularisation in March, on a motion carried by the PP, Vox, Junts and UPN. The decree went ahead anyway, because a royal decree doesn’t need the chamber. That is legal. It is also the exact thing a government does when it knows it can’t win the vote and has decided the vote is optional.
Sánchez’s underlying case is not stupid. An ageing country with emptying provinces and a pension bill coming due does need working-age arrivals, and each regularised worker plausibly returns something to the treasury. Fine. But the argument was never made to the electorate and submitted for judgement. It was executed around them. And the CIS registered the response within weeks: concern about immigration jumped four and a half points in a single month during the application window, to second place nationally, behind only housing.
People do not react like that to a policy. They react like that to being handled.
The Corruption Is Not a Story About One Bad Minister
I’ll extend the presumption of innocence to every name below, sincerely, and it changes nothing about the point.
The Guardia Civil’s economic crime unit — a state body, operating under a socialist interior ministry — pulled the Cerdán material off a hard drive found at José Luis Ábalos’s home. The allegation is public contracts steered to friendly firms in exchange for commissions running past six figures. Ábalos was Sánchez’s transport minister. Santos Cerdán was the man who negotiated the 2023 investiture with Junts and the pro-independence bloc — that is, the person who assembled the government’s parliamentary existence. This isn’t a rogue subordinate. It’s the load-bearing structure.
Since then: the prime minister’s wife formally charged in April on embezzlement and influence-peddling counts. His brother under investigation. And in May, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero himself imputed over the state’s fifty-three-million-euro rescue of an airline, in a file the police built from a hundred and seventy-four transfers. He denies everything and calls it political persecution. He may be entirely vindicated.
The verdicts aren’t the story. The pattern of who this man surrounded himself with is the story, and no acquittal fixes that.
What I’m Not Arguing
I’m not arguing that Spain needs less immigration in the aggregate. It doesn’t. The demographic arithmetic is on Sánchez’s side and his critics mostly refuse to do the sums.
I’m not arguing the economy is failing. It isn’t. Anyone telling you Spain is an economic ruin in 2026 is selling something.
And I’m certainly not arguing that Feijóo has earned this. The PP polls in the low thirties against a government drowning in criminal files, which is an indictment of the opposition, not a mandate. A PP government dependent on Vox will not build houses in Madrid either, and the rightward drift through Extremadura and Andalucía is a verdict on the incumbent rather than an endorsement of anyone.
What I’m arguing is narrower and harder to escape. On housing, this government legislated and made it worse. On immigration, it discovered the scale of its own failure and legalised the result without asking. On probity, it staffed itself from a network now being catalogued by the Guardia Civil. And it has ruled out an early election, so none of this gets tested until 2027.
They stopped asking.