The Iberian Exception

In Portugal, the Socialist Party (PS) took office in 2015 with support from the Communists and the Left Bloc after negotiating a platform for government that included a batch of popular measures. Those measures included the restoration of public holidays that the previous government had canceled at the behest of the European Union.

Four years later, the Socialists increased their vote share by 4 percent and came close to winning an absolute majority of seats. In 2022, António Costa led his party to another victory, adding 5 percent to its 2019 score and enabling the PS to form a single-party administration.

In Spain, Pedro Sánchez first became prime minister at the head of a minority government in 2018. When the next general election was held in April 2019, the Spanish Socialists (PSOE) increased their vote share by 6 percent. After a second election in November of the same year, when the Socialist vote decreased slightly, Sánchez formed a durable coalition with the left-wing Unidas Podemos alliance.

The Socialist leader went on to defy predictions of a right-wing triumph in the 2023 election. PSOE’s vote share went up again, this time by nearly 4 percent, and Sánchez was able to negotiate another coalition with the radical left, now represented by Sumar.

Unlike Costa, who stepped down in 2024 after more than eight years in office, Sánchez is still the prime minister of his country. He has recently announced plans to make it easier for immigrants to settle in Spain, arguing that Spanish society would suffer if immigration was to be halted:

Almost half of our municipalities are at risk of depopulation. We have elderly people who need a caregiver and can’t find one. Companies that are looking for programmers, technicians, bricklayers and cannot find them. Rural schools that need children so that they don’t have to close their doors.

Sánchez recalled the history of emigration from Spain during the Franco era and issued a direct challenge to the xenophobic discourse of the far right:

I want citizens to understand that this is not a battle between Spaniards and foreigners, or Christians and Muslims, or saints and criminals. It is a battle between truth and lies, between tales and data, between what is in the interests of our society and the interests of a few who see fear and hatred of foreigners as their only path to power.

The Spanish prime minister is certainly not proposing an “open borders” policy. And Spanish border guards have been responsible for lethal violence against refugees trying to enter the Ceuta enclave from Morocco during his time in office. However, there have been very few recent examples of European leaders throwing down the gauntlet to anti-immigrant political forces instead of trying to ape their rhetoric, so we should not underestimate the significance of what Sánchez is doing.

It is too early to say how successful this attempt to swim against the European tide will prove to be over the long run. But the cases of Spain and Portugal already demonstrate that it is possible for center-left parties to gain support in office without a Danish-style restrictive turn on immigration. The key factor was their record of delivering material gains for their working-class supporters.

Taking Credit

For the radical left in both countries, the experience of government was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was clear that these parties had pushed Costa and Sánchez to carry out reforms that would not have come to pass without their input. On the other hand, the bigger force in the governing alliance ended up taking most of the credit for policies that resulted in tangible improvements to people’s living standards.

By 2022, the combined vote share for the Portuguese Communist Party and the Left Bloc was less than half the 2015 figure, while the PS had increased its vote by nearly 10 percent over the space of two elections. The Spanish radical left also lost support during its time in government, albeit to a lesser extent.

There were also hard limits on what these governments were prepared to do with the levers of power. Portugal and Spain both abided by the fiscal rules of the eurozone, restricting the scope for public investment to repair the damage inflicted by the economic crash and a series of draconian austerity programs. French president Emmanuel Macron has now belatedly taken a stand against those rules, more than a decade after their malign impact on European welfare states should have been clear.

The issue of employment legislation proved a key line of division. The radical-left parties were determined to restore the rights that Portuguese and Spanish workers had possessed before the 2008 crash and the erosion of those rights under pressure from the European Union. Their center-left partners did not want to go that far as they faced strong opposition from employers to the empowerment of workers.

In Portugal, this divergence was one of the main factors behind the ultimate breakdown of the partnership between the Socialists and the Left Bloc. In Spain, Yolanda Díaz took the labor ministry so that she could supervise the restoration of employment rights, but the PSOE leadership intervened to water down her plans after frantic lobbying from business circles.

It is worth lingering on this point, after all the effort that has been channeled into equating the politics of the radical left with those of the far right. When far-right parties gain political influence, they demand government policies that will make life harder for vulnerable minorities, from refugees to trans people. When radical-left parties gain political influence, they demand the strengthening of workers’ rights or increased public expenditure on housing and health care.

Sánchez and Starmer

In the short run, the Portuguese Socialists appear to have convinced the left-leaning electorate that the Communists and the Left Bloc were setting the bar too high with their policy demands; this argument helped them secure an overall majority in 2022. However, Costa subsequently resigned in murky circumstances because of a corruption investigation, during which the prosecutors’ office confused him with another Socialist politician who had a very similar name. Whatever the full story behind “Operation Influencer” may be, it precipitated a snap election that the Socialists lost in 2024.

In spite of Costa’s ultimate downfall, his government and that of Sánchez qualify as success stories by the criteria that David Leonhardt lays down, in two countries that have a combined population of almost 59 million — about ten times larger than Denmark’s. Spain alone, where the PSOE-Sumar coalition still holds office, has the fourth-biggest population and the fourth-biggest economy in the EU.

A Guardian editorial recently celebrated Spain as a welcome exception to the West European norm:

At a time when much of the mainstream centre-left appears to have lost faith in progressive political solutions, the Sánchez government’s achievements deserve to be celebrated. A robustly social democratic approach to economic renewal, and a recognition of what migrants can offer ageing societies, remains the best response to the rise of nationalist, xenophobic politics.

With the hard right gaining ground on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s perfectly natural to welcome progressive advances wherever they can be found. But we should also remember what made those advances possible.

Pedro Sánchez was only able to form a coalition with Unidas Podemos in the first place because he fought back successfully against a palace coup by right-wing figures in his own party and appealed to the PSOE membership for support. The PSOE old guard represented by his vanquished opponent Susana Díaz took their line from the former prime minister Felipe González, who went on to enjoy a lucrative career in the private sector after retiring from politics.

In Britain, on the other hand, marginalizing and delegitimizing the left wing of the Labour Party was one of the main priorities for the leadership of Keir Starmer. Starmer received encouragement and assistance in this task from Tony Blair, the local version of González, and Blairite luminaries such as Peter Mandelson — not to mention Guardian columnists like Polly Toynbee, Jonathan Freedland, and Rafael Behr, who cheered on every move against the Left.

Pseudo-Pragmatism

Starmer frequently justified his moves against the Left as a righteous struggle against antisemitism, which he cynically conflated with support for Palestinian human rights. If Sánchez and his cabinet colleagues had been Labour MPs, Starmer would certainly have kicked them out of the party for the statements they have made condemning Israel’s murderous onslaught against the civilian population of Gaza. The Spanish defense minister, Margarita Robles, has described the attack on Gaza as “a real genocide,” and Sánchez has called for an arms embargo and the suspension of the EU’s free-trade agreement with Israel.

When Starmer won a big majority in Parliament with a very low vote share after the Conservative Party self-destructed, there was a brief flurry of triumphalism from those who think the Left should never have a place at the political table. In France, Socialist politicians cited the British example as they sought to break up the left alliance that stopped Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from taking power last summer.

A few months later, Labour’s poll ratings have tanked, and the rest of Starmer’s time in office promises to be a dispiriting march rightward. Meanwhile, the French Socialists have scuttled the alliance anyway so they can prop up the minority government that Macron has appointed — not in return for any real concessions on matters of policy, but merely for the sake of compromising with the neoliberal center in the name of responsibility. Le Pen and her team will be rubbing their hands with delight.

The idea that excluding the radical left and reaching out to the center is the road to success is a classic example of pseudo-pragmatism (one that has been receiving plenty of airtime in the United States since the defeat of Kamala Harris). In reality, this approach involves shutting out the main source of new energy on the Left while shackling what remains to a moribund consensus. The reforms carried out in Spain and Portugal are fairly modest, but they would still never have happened if the radical left had not been as strong and as influential as it was.