Pedro Sánchez Spain's anti-corruption PM now finds party mired in scandal

Pedro Sánchez could be forgiven for remembering the autumn of 2018 with a deep and nostalgic sigh.

- Sam Jones

Pedro Sánchez could be forgiven for remembering the autumn of 2018 with a deep and nostalgic sigh. Back then, having been in office for just six months, Spain's socialist prime minister could afford to mock his opponents' attempts to depict him and his administration as an existential threat to the country.

"I know you think I'm a dangerous, extreme leftwinger who's trying to break Spain apart," he told the senate at the end of October that year. "I know that everything I do, and everything my government does, is illegal, immoral and even fattening."

Almost seven years on, that barb has not aged well. The EU's last centre-left leader is fighting the most crucial battle of his political life. The events of the past seven days - and, indeed, the past year - have battered the reputation of Spain's socialist-led minority government and of the man who came to power as a self-declared scourge of corruption.

Sánchez, 53, made Spanish political history in June 2018 when he became the first opposition leader to successfully use a motion of no confidence to oust a sitting government and become prime minister. By then, the conservative People's party (PP) had been in power for seven years, was mired in graft scandals and had just been damaged by a court's ruling that the party had profited from a kickbacks-for-contracts scheme.

Its then leader Mariano Rajoy had also suffered the ignominy of becoming the first serving Spanish prime minister to have given evidence in a criminal trial.

Unveiling his confidence motion, Sánchez complained that the PP had "seriously damaged the health of our democracy" and plunged the country's politics into what he termed a "corruption thriller".

It is another phrase that has not aged well. Today it is his government and his inner circle that sit at the centre of a web of alleged plots that would seem too numerous, too unlikely and too convoluted for an airport novel.