Will
Pedro Sánchez’s gamble to call snap general election in Spain pay off?
Spanish
PM is hoping to shore up his fragile mandate by tapping into public anger over
country’s housing crisis
Sam Jones in Madrid
Mon 5 Oct
2026 13.18 CEST
Spaniards
will head to the polls on 29 November – months before schedule – after the
country’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced
a snap general election on Monday morning. The vote, which will be Spain’s
fifth general election in 10 years, is likely to be dominated by growing anger
over the housing crisis
Why has
Sánchez called the snap general election?
Although
the next general election was due to be held sometime before the end of next
summer, Sánchez has decided to gamble by bringing it forward in the hope that widespread
anger over Spain’s housing crisis could work to his advantage and allow him
to shore up his fragile mandate.
The
eviction last month of Maricarmen
Abascal, an 87-year-old woman who was removed from the home in Madrid where
she had lived for 70 years, unleashed huge protests. Sánchez’s minority
coalition government responded by putting together emergency measures that were
put before congress at the end of last week. Despite the evident strength of
public feeling, the conservative People’s party (PP), the far-right Vox party
and the rightwing, pro-independence Catalan party Junts voted
down the measures, infuriating housing campaigners and many ordinary
Spaniards.
Sánchez,
who has a well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, risk-taking and
improvisation, has seen his chance. While his critics argue that his eight
years in office should have given him time to address Spain’s housing problems,
both the protests and the rightwing opposition to his emergency measures offer
Sánchez the chance to leverage the issue for electoral ends.
People
march in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, to demand measures to address Spain’s
housing crisis. Photograph: Alex Basha/JNA/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
How are
the polls looking?
Not great
for Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), which has been trailing
the PP for months. Although the PP is firmly in the lead, it doesn’t appear to
be on course for an absolute majority, meaning it would be forced to rely on
the support of Vox to govern – possibly in a coalition.
What
would such a coalition mean for Spanish politics?
If Vox
were to take office with the PP, it would be the first time that a far-right
party has governed Spain since the country’s return to democracy after the
death of Francisco Franco in 1975.
The PP, which
repudiated Vox in 2020, accusing them of being demagogues who practised a
politics based on “fear, anger, resentment and revenge”, has since bitten its
tongue and repeatedly entered into pragmatic regional coalitions with the
far-right party. The price for Vox’s backing in those regions recently has been
the adoption of the party’s hard line on immigration, including its “national
priority” policy that insists Spanish-born
people receive priority over those born abroad for housing and public
services.
The
opposition People’s party leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, gestures during a press
conference after the snap general election was announced. Photograph:
Mariscal/EPA
It sounds
like quite a gamble, then. Why is Sánchez prepared to risk the early election?
The prime
minister only
just scraped his return to office in the last general election in July 2023
after he won the backing of Catalan pro-independence parties by promising a controversial
amnesty law to those involved in the failed, illegal push for independence
from Spain in 2017. Sánchez’s minority coalition government with the smaller,
leftwing Sumar alliance, has struggled to get legislation through a fraught
congress and has not passed a budget since 2023. Junts, which offered him
conditional support three years ago, has attempted to extract maximum benefits
from the government, only to abandon it when it feels so inclined, as it did
with the emergency housing measures.
Nor do
his problems end there. The government has also been fiercely criticised over
its handling of the crisis
in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta, which was sparked when about 70,000
people crossed into the territory from neighbouring Morocco in the space of
48 hours.
Last, but
by no means least, Sánchez’s administration, party and inner circle have been mired
in corruption allegations over the past two years, which have proved
acutely embarrassing for a prime minister who took office vowing to be a
scourge of sleaze and graft.
Faced
with all that, it’s not hard to see why the prime minister may have decided
that an early election was preferable to several more months of legislative
deadlock, mud-slinging and uncomfortable headlines.
Pedro
Sánchez’s coalition government has struggled to get legislation through a
fraught congress and has not passed a budget since 2023. Photograph: Susana
Vera/Reuters
What
happens now?
Sánchez,
a politician with an almost feline allocation of lives, will be hoping that his
efforts to tackle the housing crisis will contrast sharply with those of his
rightwing opponents and thereby mobilise disenchanted voters. He was also
careful to remind people in his address on Monday that he has been one
of the few political leaders to stand up to Donald Trump, to repeatedly
criticise Israel over its actions in Gaza, and to warn
of the death and destruction caused by the climate crisis.
Perhaps
unsurprisingly given what’s at stake, the prime minister is once again pushing
to characterise this latest election as a simple choice between progressive and
reactionary politics.
“You, the
men and women of Spain, must decide whether you want to join the far-right wave
that drives regression wherever it governs, or to ensure that Spain remains a
bastion of openness, social justice, and environmental responsibility,” he said
on Monday morning.
Sánchez’s
opponents, meanwhile, will be hoping that, after eight long years, the public
has grown tired and disillusioned, and that the great survivor of Spanish
politics has finally lost his lustre.
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