Feijóo’s
now-or-never moment to lead Spain
The
Socialists, stricken by scandals, may be forced to call a snap election, giving
the conservative leader an opportunity that is unlikely to come again.
July 1, 2025
4:01 am CET
By Guy
Hedgecoe
MADRID —
With his conservative People’s Party comfortably ahead in polls and the
Socialist-led government mired in scandals, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has never
looked so close to becoming Spanish prime minister.
In theory,
Spain doesn’t need to hold a general election until 2027 but outrage over
corruption investigations into the center-left party of Prime Minister Pedro
Sánchez is building to such a fever pitch that the country could well be
heading for a snap election.
This
weekend, Feijóo will lead an extraordinary convention of his party in Madrid to
confirm his position as leader and amplify the idea that he is ready to govern.
“Let’s end
this nightmare,” he told supporters as he lambasted Sánchez. “We just want to
know when he’s going to sign his resignation letter.”
Removing
Sánchez, however, comes down to tight margins in parliamentary alliances. When
grilled about why he had not brought a motion of no confidence in the battered
government on June 18, Feijóo told Sánchez: “I don’t lack willingness, I lack
four votes.”
At the
national level, most polls show the People’s Party (PP) leading Sánchez’s
Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) by a clear margin — echoing the 2023 election.
POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts the PP on 34 percent and the Socialists on 27
percent.
“Feijóo
knows that it’s now or never, because I don’t think he’ll have another chance
like this,” said Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at Barcelona’s
Autonomous University.
Despite
winning the most votes in 2023, Feijóo was unable to form a governing majority.
Instead, Sánchez managed to bring together a broad coalition of allies —
perhaps most critically a handful of small Catalan and Basque parties, which
abhor the PP’s strident hostility to separatism and its willingness to engage
with the far-right Vox.
The
pressures Feijóo faces in Madrid have pushed him to team up with forces further
to the right, where he’s found strong allies in attacking the leftist
government. Many polls suggest the PP and Vox could together win enough seats
in an election to form a majority.
But none of
this means Feijóo will find it plain sailing to take power. His own party also
has a corrupt image, while he faces stiff competition from within its ranks.
Despite the woes of the Socialists, Feijóo may still lack sufficient support to
build a governing alliance.
While he
certainly has a prime opportunity, nothing is guaranteed.
Socialists
under siege
The most
recent investigations into corruption have been a gift for Feijóo and his
party, who describe the Sánchez government as “a mafia.”
On June 12,
Sánchez apologized to Spaniards for having trusted Santos Cerdán, his party’s
No. 3, who was implicated by audio recordings in a kickbacks-for-contracts
scheme. The affair also triggered an investigation into another former senior
Socialist and Sánchez ally, José Luis Ábalos, who had been transport minister.
Cerdán, who denies involvement in the scheme, has been placed in preventive
custody.
The
recordings included sordid discussions about prostitutes and apparent evidence
that Sánchez’s allies had rigged voting when he won the PSOE primary in 2014.
Meanwhile,
other recordings seemed to show party operative Leire Díez offering favorable
treatment to a businessman in exchange for damaging information about the Civil
Guard unit probing individuals close to Sánchez, including his wife and
brother. Díez says she was gathering material for a book.
Regardless
of the revelations, the prime minister has refused to resign or bring forward
elections, arguing that the scandals are isolated cases and that he is keeping
an extremist opposition out of power.
As long as
his delicate parliamentary majority remains in place, there is little Feijóo
can do to oust him.
Swinging too
far right?
Feijóo, 63,
took the reins of the party in 2022 as a seasoned moderate who had won four
elections in a row in the northwestern region of Galicia, a PP stronghold.
He has
launched fierce attacks on the government for its willingness to engage with
separatists and push through an amnesty law to benefit the pro-independence
Catalans, which form a critical part of the fragile Sánchez coalition.
Facing
pressure from the right-wing media, Vox, and PP colleague Isabel Díaz Ayuso,
president of the Madrid region and a potential competitor, Feijóo has variously
described Sánchez as a caudillo — meaning “strongman,” a term used to refer to
dictator Francisco Franco — “an international embarrassment” and “a veritable
threat to democracy.”
He has also
taken this combative approach to Brussels, where the PP unsuccessfully tried to
block the appointment of Spanish Socialist Teresa Ribera as European
commissioner. In May, the PP successfully campaigned to thwart a Spanish
government effort to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official EU languages —
an important promise Sánchez made to the nationalist parties in his coalition.
“Feijóo
underwent a process of radicalization and now his position is one of a classic
Madrid conservative leader,” said Bartomeus, who says he has still not won over
many traditional PP voters. “But when you spend every moment warning of the
apocalypse and then the apocalypse doesn’t come, you start to have a problem.”
Frustrated,
Feijóo has even floated the possibility Sánchez committed fraud in the 2023
general election. Pointing to apparent irregularities in the 2014 Socialist
primary, he said: “If you’ve already robbed a jewelry store, why not rob a
bank?”
Such
comments have drawn claims that the PP leader has strayed into the territory of
Vox further to the right.
“Feijóo is
two interviews away from saying that the Earth is flat and vaccines kill,” said
left-wing commentator Esther Palomera.
No strangers
to scandal
The longer
the famously resilient Sánchez digs in, the less time remains for Feijóo.
That’s
partly due to the high stock of two of his rivals in the PP: hardline maverick
Ayuso and the moderate president of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, both seen
as potential threats to take the leadership.
And that’s
before we even get to the corruption problem within Feijóo’s own party.
Sánchez took
power in 2018 by removing the scandal-plagued PP of Mariano Rajoy from
government. The judicial fallout from that era continues, with several cases
involving conservative politicians still being processed.
In the
spring of 2026, the “Operation Kitchen” case is due to come to trial, with
former senior PP figures facing accusations of orchestrating a deep-state
operation to destroy damaging evidence against the party. The trial could
cement the idea that graft plagues both mainstream parties, bolstering the far
right in polls.
Meanwhile,
the Socialists have reminded Spaniards of Feijóo’s former friendship with a
notorious Galician drug trafficker, Marcial Dorado. In 2013, photos were
published of the men on vacation together in the 1990s. Feijóo has never
explained the circumstances of the relationship.
Instead, he
embraced the idea of being someone to whom success does not necessarily come
easily.
“Today, I
tell you with all humility that I am better than the politician who achieves
his objectives the first time around,” he said recently.
Time is
running out for him to prove that remains the case.
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