Early this summer, no one would have bet a single euro that Pedro Sánchez would still today be Spain’s prime minister. After May’s local elections, in which the opposition right-wing parties won handsomely, many thought that the Socialist Party (PSOE) leader Sánchez belonged to the politically walking dead. Polls ahead of the general election held on July 23 suggested no hope of a reprieve.

Madrid looked like another European capital about to be conquered by conservatives and their far-right allies, just like Rome, Stockholm, Helsinki and Athens. But things turned out differently. Spain’s broad-left coalition held on — showing that such parties’ only proven weapon to defeat the local emulators of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro is to do something to mobilize their own electorate.

Still, July’s election results, which denied the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and Spanish nationalist Vox the majority that they had widely been expected to conquer, left Sánchez little room for maneuver. There was no clear left-wing majority either, and this time around — unlike in the previous legislature — forming another government required the votes of essentially every force in parliament except the PP-Vox duo. Securing one supporter looked especially fantastical: that is, Carles Puigdemont, leader of Junts per Catalunya (JxCAT), a right-wing Catalan-independentist force that consistently voted against the 2020–23 government formed by Sánchez’s PSOE and left-wing Unidas Podemos.