Spain’s Deputy PM: Workers Have the Power
Spain’s deputy premier Yolanda Díaz has enacted landmark reforms to strengthen workers’ rights. In an interview, she tells Jacobin that “there’s no more powerful force than the workers of the world.”
Yolanda Díaz talks to the press on April 3, 2025, in Madrid, Spain. (Matias Chiofalo / Europa Press via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- David Broder
Spain’s broad-left government is five years old — and has achieved some real successes for working-class people. Headed by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Partido Socialista (PSOE) and his deputy Yolanda Díaz of left-wing alliance Sumar, it is now in its second term in office, defying most pundits’ predictions to win reelection in July 2023 thanks to such achievements as a steep rise in the minimum wage and a cap on energy bills.
It’s not been easy. The ruling coalition has a wafer-thin majority even when backed by regionalist parties, and the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and far-right Vox have rolled out their media and judicial allies to try to destabilize it. Donald Trump’s new tariffs have added to a difficult international picture. At the same time, the European Union (EU) is boosting its military spending — also encouraging member states to pivot their economies toward the weapons industry.
Left-winger Díaz, who is also labor minister, has been a major force pushing for workers’ rights in precarious sectors, from food delivery to domestic work and more besides. In an interview, she spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the calls for Europe to rearm, the Spanish left’s record in office, and what it can do to continue rebuilding working-class support.
Let’s start with the current push to increase Europe’s military spending. Spanish premier Pedro Sánchez has talked about a “grand national defense plan.” He also promises that won’t come at the cost of social spending. So what’s different about your proposal for European security and strategic autonomy?
Firstly, it’s a serious mistake that the European Union has subordinated its foreign policy to the United States all these years. The European project needs its own identity, including in a political and economic sense. We are seeing this now with the tariff war launched by Donald Trump, which could cause enormous pain around the world. Europe needs its own fiscal policy; it must be more like the Europe that we saw during the pandemic response.
We’re in a geopolitical moment where we’re on the back foot, led by the far right who — with a few small oligarchies and in an antidemocratic manner — want to rule the world through tariff wars, but also by causing two brutal wars, one in Ukraine and the other with the genocide in Palestine.
Our proposal is clear: EU foreign policy must not be subordinate to the United States, especially under Elon Musk and Trump. Europe must first analyze what security and defense policy we need in the twenty-first century. There is nothing more insecure than poverty and nine million poor people in Europe. There is nothing more insecure than inequality. Insecurity is the climate emergency. Security is solving the deindustrialization that Europe is experiencing, when we are sandwiched between Washington and China and have enormous productivity problems.
What is Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal? She has presented the ReArm plan, which we do not agree with at all. It seeks rearmament at will, allowing the debt rules to be suspended. There is a fiscal straitjacket oppressing member states, which is loosened only in order to buy weapons and not for measures to favor job creation or to combat social deprivation or the climate emergency. This neoliberal Europe is going in a direction radically opposed to what we stand for.
The EU today allocates €375 billion to defense policies. That is three times more than Russia does. And far from moving in a common European direction — one that talks about the strategic themes of cybersecurity and digital sovereignty, one that asks if our data is in the hands of Elon Musk — in her white paper on defense, von der Leyen is saying that we should continue to increase military budgets in each individual member state without coordinating any policy in this area.
Trump knows what he is doing. The United States has a trade deficit with the EU, and he resents that fact. So when he says that we should increase military budgets to 5 percent of GDP, fundamentally he is sending a message that Europe must buy more weapons from the United States. Spain — which dedicates 1.2 percent of its GDP to defense — if it doubles [defense spending] to 2 percent, as [Pedro Sánchez] has committed to, could only do so by buying weapons from two countries: the United States, balancing out the trade deficit, and Israel.
This is, of course, not our proposal. You cannot execute a defense plan in one, two, three years. For us, the model is Eurofighter. The model is what’s been done with European industry: for instance, Airbus, with its fight with Boeing that ended up in court, and which Airbus won. We have shown that industrial cooperation in Europe works. So let’s move toward a model like that.
On strategic autonomy: Mario Draghi’s competitiveness report was meant to allocate €800 billion to a production model based on ecology, industrial policy, and so on. It would be a serious mistake to limit strategic autonomy to armaments and defense.
The ReArm plan fits into a far-right dynamic. It projects a Europe of hate on fear that tells Europeans to arm themselves, to dedicate their budgets to the military, but does not solve Europeans’ problems — of unemployment, of low wages. If Europe continues down this path, we will further alienate citizens, and they will end up even more prone to swing to the far right.
Draghi’s report has been described by many observers as a project for military Keynesianism, which could serve as the pretext for new, European collective borrowing. For instance, Giorgia Meloni’s party is critical of European borrowing directed toward the Green New Deal but may take a different attitude toward rearmament.
Draghi’s report was talking about a project for strategic autonomy in industry, and in just a few days von der Leyen has reconfigured this — €800 billion, but only for defense. This is in line with a war economy, and this is what we do not agree with.
Today we need more Europe. We need to wake up to the threat from Vladimir Putin and the Trump threat. But to do that, Europe has to give hope and have an autonomous strength of its own. It has to be based on a Keynesianism that can develop a New Deal or a social contract. The European project was born out of the union between welfare, the world of work, and peace. The proposal to rearm, without these other elements, turns that on its head.
The [EU’s] social summit in Porto in May is going to be key. It’s something that I am working on as Spain’s minister of labor. Effectively they want to dilute the social summit with the excuse of military Keynesianism. Probably, if John Maynard Keynes were alive, he would be alarmed by this definition of what “Keynesianism” is.
Since 2020, this government has taken important steps on capping energy prices and raising the minimum wage, and currently there’s a debate on whether the latter should be taxed or not. But beyond action on the cost of living, the recent reform to labor law, and measures for delivery riders or domestic workers, what can the government do to give workers more power?
There’s no more powerful force than the workers of the world. We have to speak to workers — and an increasingly complex world of work.
A true oligarchy is developing: that of a few multinationals acting in an absolutely undemocratic way, paying hardly any taxes, appropriating and dispossessing the world’s citizens of our data, which is crucial today. The debate today is about replacing the Washington Consensus with the Silicon Valley consensus. But it is exactly the same thing. The far right uses its far-right positions but has a shared agenda: to do away with class unions, to do away with workers’ rights. It means doing away with the tool that workers have for advancing their demands, which is the strike.
The right to strike is being discussed right now at the International Labour Organization (ILO). The 113th Session of the ILO in June is going to be key in this regard. Around the world, we see the destruction of the rights won through the accumulated struggle of all these years, in favor of near-slavery.
So I believe that it makes more sense than ever to fight for and encourage the world of work. But work is very complex today. There was the twentieth-century world of Fordist work, what we think of as industrial workers in overalls. Now there is a brutal range of different realities: unionized workers, domestic workers, young interns. Still, workers are the social majority, and what first needs doing is to demonstrate this. I humbly believe that this is what we have done in Spain.
In this country, there have been fifty-two labor reforms. The last two, one from the PSOE and one from the [conservative] Partido Popular, were practically identical. They were the same throughout Europe: they imposed the company’s decision on the workers, allowing collective agreements to fall down. We are the only country in which — after my labor law reform — old collective agreements continue to apply even when they reach their expiration date [i.e., avoiding workers losing rights because no new agreement with management has been made]. Instead, what has been imposed [elsewhere] is a neoliberal model that brutally deregulates the labor market and dismantles — or, rather, takes over — the state.
We kept our manifesto promise. Today I no longer have to make the case for this labor law reform, because there are almost 22 million people employed in Spain, more than ever before. Spanish workers today have indefinite contracts. We have to give people hope and show those unionists, those domestic workers, those young people that they are the majority.
As against Trump’s international of hate, we need an international of hope. When I launched the International Labor Congress in Madrid a few months ago, we told the world that we need a shared social agenda. We will have all manner of diversities, but there is a basic common denominator. We have defeated the neoliberal arguments, which are the same ones made around the world, including in the United States against Bernie Sanders. When we increased the minimum wage — eventually, by 61 percent — people said the world was going to come to an end. But the opposite happened. The number of people in work is growing, and with more labor rights, more social protection. This also means collecting more taxes, having more social contributions, more economic efficiency.
Neoliberalism cannot allow this to be known. It runs against the Thatcherite claim: “There is no alternative.” There is such an alternative. I believe that I have been the only labor minister since Spain’s return to democracy who has gone to the May 1 demonstration. I’ve been going since I was a child and will continue to do so. Why? Because I represent what I represent. But also because I’m the first labor minister whose ministry is not supervised by the Economy Ministry. It’s the other way around. Further, I’m proud to represent the world of work. I know well where I come from, when it was shameful to say that you were the daughter of working people. Well, I believe that when working people see me walking down the street, they see that I am like them.
The far right resists feminism and trade unionism, denies climate change, and denies democracy because it knows that the fight for women’s and workers’ rights is what makes democracy grow. Their hatred does not create jobs, does not raise salaries, does not reduce inequality, but paralyzes people. Without hope, the world does not move. And this has been the case since Spartacus. I say he is the greatest trade unionist in history.
Spanish electoral politics has for some years seen a de facto pact between the PSOE, left-wing lists, and also regionalists versus a radicalized right-wing bloc. There is strong opposition between the two sides, if not a return to the two-party politics of old, given the fragmentation of the party system. But what can the Left do to reach beyond this, to speak to those Spaniards who don’t vote for progressive parties?
This is a big question. In Spain, as in the rest of the world, Trump won by 1.5 points, but it’s not really that his vote increased. It’s that a lot of Democrats didn’t vote.
In Spain, we have more citizen disaffection than in 2015. There is a huge democratic deficit, and people no longer trust the system. This is what the far right is looking for. It wants to stop things from working. If the public sector doesn’t work, citizens in any country will say, “I’m not voting anymore, or I’ll vote for the far right.” That’s why the far right appears with a chain saw in hand: to destroy everything and to push the citizenry away from the values — our values — of the common good and changing what exists for the better.
What do we have to do? Talk to people. Understand each other. Talk about public policies. Not talk to ourselves. I was taught at home that when a political group becomes an end in itself, it’s not useful to society.
There’s too much pain out there. We must talk and focus on what unites us in our diversity. I was in Brussels [on March 25] with many progressive political groups, all different. But we have to be able to agree, because there are many more things that unite us than separate us. So we have an ethical and moral duty to march together but to talk to the street — to the people. We need to give them reasons to turn out and vote.
To return to the US elections: How come the Democrats didn’t win when they had good stewardship of the economy? Beyond the mistakes that will always be made, there are elements of alienation of the Democratic base from the project, in this case from Joe Biden, and I think that this is key. I am surely not satisfied for Spain to be an exception in [terms of the Left’s success] fighting the far right. What I will say, though, is that you aren’t going to win from fear: “Vote for me because the wolf is at the door.” You only win from the conviction that we’re going to transform our country, that we’re going to gain better rights.
Spain has one of the most pro-Palestinian of all European governments. But what more could it materially do?
I’m proud of what the Spanish government is doing and achieving in relation to the genocide in Palestine and the other wars around the world.
We have recognized the Palestinian state, and I myself work on a daily basis not with the ambassador but with the Palestinian labor minister on a whole host of projects with real commitment and recognition on the part of the Palestinian government.
But the public is in shock because we are seeing international institutions that respond to a twentieth-century logic. We see the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu turning his fire against the secretary-general of the United Nations, and nothing follows.
I was in the United States during the primaries and saw how the Palestinian cause impacted the debates that the Democrats were having. So what needs doing? Put an end to international hypocrisy. International law and human rights cannot be relativized; they are the same for everyone. If we have imposed sanctions on Russia and we have acted against them, we must do the same with Netanyahu and the Israeli government, which is violating international law. Why don’t we sanction Netanyahu? I’ll put that out there.
I am a deputy prime minister who works on a daily basis, of course, with the Palestinian government, with all the affection I have for the Palestinian minister of labor; and I am also taking action through the ILO to be able to help in Palestine.