Pedro Sanchez
Pedro Sánchez has been Prime Minister of Spain since June 2018, having reached office without winning an election and held it through three inconclusive ones. Born in Madrid in 1972, he studied economics, took a doctorate, worked as an adviser in the European Parliament and for the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and served as a Madrid city councillor. He became a member of parliament in 2009 and won the leadership of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party in 2014 as a little-known outsider. After two failed elections he refused to let Mariano Rajoy govern, and in October 2016 his own party's federal committee forced him out; he resigned his seat rather than abstain, drove around Spain campaigning among the membership, and won the leadership back in a primary in May 2017 against the party establishment. In June 2018, after a court found the People's Party had operated an illegal financing scheme, he won Spain's first successful no-confidence vote and became prime minister with only eighty-four of 350 seats. He has governed by assembling parliamentary majorities from parties with little in common — the left-wing Podemos and then Sumar, Basque nationalists, and Catalan independence parties. That has required concessions his opponents call illegitimate: pardons in 2021 for the Catalan leaders jailed over the 2017 independence referendum, and an amnesty law passed in 2024 covering hundreds involved in it, which secured Carles Puigdemont's votes. His record includes labour-market reform, sharp minimum-wage rises, a euthanasia law, and strong post-pandemic growth. His second term has been shadowed by corruption investigations touching close associates and his wife. Spain outgrew every other large European economy in 2024.
- Lived: 1972 CE – ?
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: Prime Minister of Spain (2018-present)
