You Need Solidarity' Sánchez Shows Another Way of Leading From the Left

When Pedro Sánchez and Keir Starmer meet in Downing Street today, it will be the first such bilateral summit between a Spanish prime minister and his British counterpart for more than a decade, an interregnum explained by Brexit and the now-healed running sore of Gibraltar.

- Patrick Wintour

The absence of highest-level diplomacy has become more glaring given the two men are the foremost social democratic leaders of Europe, facing similar problems of migration, soaring populist parties, the climate crisis and divisions over how to minimise the damage caused to European global influence by Donald Trump's erratic unilateralism.

But in a Guardian interview with Sánchez in the prime minister's stark white office in Madrid, the contrasts as much as similarities were on display in the choices being made by the two leaders.

In many ways, Sánchez, putting aside the corruption allegations that dog his family and former senior advisers, is the kind of socialist that many ordinary British Labour party members crave as they urge their leadership to move off a political agenda determined by Reform UK that they fear Starmer can never win.

Sometimes accused of not wielding Spain's influence on the world stage - he was not invited to the recent European discussions with Trump - Sánchez showed a willingness to frame a values-based foreign policy that could transcend what he described as the transatlantic bond.

On migration, for instance, Sánchez, faced by Vox, the rightwing populist party currently at 15% in the polls, will not apologise for saying migration is a necessary boon to the economy.

“I am willing to explain the figures and how migration is helping to boost the economy and to increase our social spending.

“We have to do it with clear data in order to fight the populist approach,” he said.

“In Spain, migration represents 25% of our per capita GDP, 10% of our social security revenues and only 1% of our public expenditure.”

Faced by accelerating population decline, western societies face a “dilemma between opening-up and growing or closing-off and shrinking”, he argued.