Spain is no place for women and girls under Pedro Sánchez

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, a wannabe golden boy of Western progressive elites, went full woke in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September. He declared that it was the ‘turn of a woman… a Latin American woman’ to become UN secretary-general when the incumbent, António Guterres, retires from the post at the end of this year. ‘How’, asked Sánchez, ‘can an organisation that claims to speak on behalf of all humanity never have had a woman at the helm?’.

This is more than a bit rich coming from Sánchez. He is the leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party – an organisation that has never been led by a woman at any point in its 147-year history. More importantly, he has enthusiastically embraced transgenderism and gender self-ID. Given this, it’s doubtful he could say what a woman is anyway. In fact, all Spanish legal protections based on sex have been undermined by a law introduced by Sánchez’s own ‘progressive’ coalition government in 2022, which allows men to legally register as women.

Sánchez’s glaring sexist hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. Despite promising to lead the ‘most feminist government in the history of Spain’, some of his senior allies never seemed to get the memo. Former transport minister José Luis Ábalos – now in prison for corruption – selected a mistress for himself from Spain’s biggest prostitution website, while belonging to a government that had pledged to ban sex work.

Sánchez’s phoney feminism becomes a cruel joke when we consider the situation in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Prosecutors recorded daily sexual assault cases in the month after 30 July, when as many as 70,000 young men flooded into the overseas territory from neighbouring Morocco. The latest allegation involves two Moroccan men in their forties, who are accused of raping a 17-year-old girl. What makes this worse is that in September, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, dismissed concerns about women’s safety in Ceuta as ‘subjective’.

Sánchez’s UN address was part of a broader PR tour in the US. This included catch-ups with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, California governor Gavin Newsom, and UK prime minister Andy Burnham. It also included a fawning interview on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, and a trip to the Harvard Kennedy School to talk to students about his favourite bogeymen: AI and tech oligarchs.

At Harvard, he appeared less prepared to answer questions about Spain’s foreign policy in Western Sahara and Venezuela, or corruption allegations involving his government and family. It was refreshing to see students putting him on the spot, something Spanish journalists hardly ever do.

Truth be told, Sánchez is running Spain into the ground. The desperate state of the nation was summed up on 23 September, when 87-year-old pensioner Maricarmen Abascal was evicted from her Madrid apartment, after being unable to afford steep rent increases. Images of Abascal being removed on a stretcher, followed by her death earlier this month, have sparked nationwide protests.

Sánchez has since called a snap election for 29 November. This came after opposition parties rejected his fast-tracked housing measures, called the ‘Maricarmen decree’. Once again, the stench of hypocrisy was asphyxiating. Sánchez’s government has overseen a significant worsening in Spain’s housing problems since he became PM in 2018. When Abascal herself sent a letter to the government asking for help, no one ever replied. And yet he has the nerve to call a snap election and campaign in her name.

Whether it’s the tragic fate of Maricarmen Abascal, the seedy habits of leading government figures, or the harm done to women and girls in Ceuta, the legacy of Pedro Sánchez is clear. Spain is no country for women and girls.

Maria Reglero is a consultant on women’s rights based in Barcelona.