Civil War Movie Explained (SPOILERS)

President Execution Scene | CIVIL WAR (2024) Movie CLIP HD

 

April 21, 2024: How the Movie ‘Civil War’ Echoes Real Political Anxieties

 

How the Movie ‘Civil War’ Echoes Real Political Anxieties

 

“Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national angst. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.

 

By Lisa Lerer

April 21, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/us/politics/civil-war-movie-politics.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

One subject seems to be unifying the right and the left today: Disunion.

 

From the multiplex to social media, the prospect of America collapsing into armed conflict has moved from being an idea on the tinfoil-hat fringes to an active undercurrent of the country’s political conversation.

 

Voters at campaign events bring up their worries that political division could lead to large-scale political violence. Pollsters regularly ask about the idea in opinion surveys. A cottage industry has arisen for speculative fiction, serious assessments and forums about whether the country could be on the verge of a modern-day version of the bloodiest war in American history.

 

And “Civil War,” a dystopian action film about an alternative America plunged into a bloody domestic conflict, has topped box office sales for two consecutive weekends. The movie has outperformed expectations at theaters from Brownsville, Texas, to Boston, tapping into a dark set of national anxieties that took hold after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.

 

Of course, the notion of a future civil war remains a mere notion. But, as another presidential election approaches, it has suddenly become a hotly debated one, reflecting the bipartisan sense of unease that has permeated American politics. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters have said they fear that the country’s divides have grown so deep that they may lead not just to rhetorical battles but actual ones.

 

“I personally do not believe we will descend into a formal armed civil war,” said Maya Wiley, who ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 and now serves as the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights group that has fielded several polls on the topic. “But it’s in the air. It doesn’t surprise me at all that we’re seeing a very explicit fear of where things could go.”

 

Such fear has been stirred by the violence and chaos that subtly and overtly pervades American politics. Violent threats against members of Congress have reached record levels, as have reports of hate crimes in the country’s largest cities. The husband of Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, was beaten with a hammer in his home. The criminal trial of a former president unfolded in a courthouse while a man nearby doused himself with an accelerant and set his body on fire.

 

In his first campaign speech of the year, President Biden warned of threats to the country’s democracy and suggested that former President Donald J. Trump could stoke future political violence.

 

“I make this sacred pledge to you: The defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency,” he said in an address near Valley Forge, Pa., the site of one of the darkest periods of the American Revolution.

 

Mr. Trump has glorified the Jan. 6 rioters as patriots and maintained his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When the former president was asked last August by Tucker Carlson whether the country was headed to open conflict, he declined to directly answer.

 

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen, and that’s probably a bad combination.”

 

The film has no grounding in such partisan politics. The sides are unclear and the ideology — a “Western Alliance” of secessionists from California and Texas — is impossible to imagine given the stark partisan divides between the states. No details are given about the cause of the conflict or the different visions each side has for the future of the country. There’s no mention of Congress, the courts or other civic institutions other than the presidency and references to the F.B.I.

 

That political vagueness was an intentional choice by the British writer and director, Alex Garland, who began working on the film in 2020 before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. “I’d say this film is about checks and balances: polarization, division, the way populist politics leads toward extremism, where extremism itself will end up and where the press is in all of that,” Mr. Garland told The New York Times.

 

His goal was to create a movie that could illustrate the risks of polarization — not just in the United States but globally — and reach the widest audience possible, said Eric Schultz, a Democratic strategist who met with Mr. Garland in the fall of 2021 and worked as a consultant for the film.

 

The opaque politics have helped the movie attract an audience that bridges political divides. Exit interviews conducted for A24, the studio that produced the movie, found that half of moviegoers identified as “liberal” and half as “conservative,” according to a person with knowledge of the film’s performance in various markets.

 

The film outperformed expectations in traditionally conservative markets like Oklahoma City and Colorado Springs, as well as more liberal ones like Portland, Ore. In Phoenix and Dallas, a majority of filmgoers identified as moderate or conservative. The top reason viewers cited for seeing the movie was not an interest in independent cinema or action films but the “political dystopian story line.”

 

The interest in political chaos tracks with a growing body of research showing a dramatic uptick in public fears of violence.

 

The polling by Ms. Wiley’s organization found that 53 percent of likely voters believed the country was on the path to a second Civil War.

 

Other surveys show related concerns. Forty-nine percent of adults said they expected violence from the losing side in future elections, in a poll conducted by CBS/YouGov this year. And a survey by The Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican adults said American democracy could be at risk depending on who won the next election.

 

Jess Morales Rocketto, a leader of Equis Research, which studies Latino voters, said discussion of a civil war could stem from more of a feeling of insecurity than a reality for voters.

 

“I think that people believe we are on the brink of civil war,” she said. “When people say stuff like civil war, World War III, what they mean is volatility and instability. They are saying, ‘I feel unsafe.’”

 

But Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies civil wars, says the prospect of such a conflict isn’t just metaphorical. She believes the country is facing a decade or two of political instability and violence that could include assassinations of politicians or judges and the rise of militia groups.

 

The movie’s realistic portrayal of such violence taking place in deeply American settings — a golf course, a roadside gas station, the Lincoln Memorial — put the scenes of violence Americans associate more with foreign conflicts into sharper relief, she said.

 

“This notion that America could never have a civil war; we’ve already had a really, really big one,” said Ms. Walter, the author of “How Civil Wars Start.” “There’s a sense of naiveté, of innocence, that we’re too good for that sort of stuff. We’re not.”

 

David Mandel, a producer and writer on the television show “Veep,” said the most successful movies and shows about American political life had a “reciprocal relationship” with public opinion about politics. His show, a comedy about a bumbling vice president that began during the Obama administration, was based on the idea that politicians behaved differently in private, and that a miscalculated public remark could lead to their political destruction. As president, Mr. Trump routinely defied that norm, and “Veep” ended before he left the White House.

 

“By a couple of weeks into the Trump administration, there was no ‘behind closed doors’ and there was no such thing as comeuppance,” Mr. Mandel said. “The show became impossible to do.”

 

David W. Blight, a historian at Yale University who specializes in the Civil War period, said he did not believe the country stood on the precipice of another one. But if the country were to reach that point, he said, the conflict could share more with the movie version than the historical one.

 

The Civil War was a regional and ideological crisis that featured some of the largest armies ever formed, he said. A second one would most likely be far more local and vigilante, and stirred by increasing polarization and institutional mistrust.

 

“For the last couple of years, there’s been all this chatter and a few books out about whether the U.S. is on the brink of a new civil war, and you have to keep telling people, ‘Well no, not in the way you may think about it,’” he said. “Our real Civil War blinds us in that sense.”

 

Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades. More about Lisa Lerer

Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War?

Opinion

Michelle Goldberg

Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War? 

Aug. 21, 2026, 5:04 a.m. ET

Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/opinion/civil-war-novels.html

 

The psychologist John Gottman said that nothing is so destructive to a marriage as contempt. Couples can come back from many sorts of conflicts, but not festering disgust — a sense, by one or both people, that the other is beneath them. That’s why, if blue and red America were spouses, the relationship would look hopeless. Call it irreconcilable differences.

 

For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics. Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement). His presidency has been devoted to punishing the places that didn’t vote for him, including by withholding health care and disaster funding. One of the things his voters have long loved about him is the humiliation and despair he causes their fellow citizens.

 

Many of those Trump partisans are still smarting over Hillary Clinton calling some of them “deplorables.” For decades they’ve been seething at the disrespect they feel emanating from America’s cultural capitals. It seems obvious to me that blue America is more abused than abuser, but that doesn’t really matter; the impossibility of coming to any agreement about the commensurability of our grievances just underlines the toxicity of the relationship.

 

Conscious uncoupling, however, isn’t easy with deeply intertwined populations that have no neat border between them. The idea of a national divorce periodically crops up in our politics — Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly called for one when she was in Congress — but it never goes anywhere because it’s unworkable. Unfortunately, the status quo seems unworkable, too. We are mutually hostile communities yoked together in a way that thwarts each faction’s ideals about a decent society. In the absence of any clear path forward, fiction becomes the outlet for this sense of intolerable stuckness, for imagining either violent catharsis or escape.

 

Two buzzy new novels take place against the backdrop of an American crackup — Kurt Andersen’s “The Breakup,” published this week, and Emily St. John Mandel’s “Exit Party,” out in September. They join a small canon of fiction about American dissolution created in the last decade, which includes novels like Omar El Akkad’s “American War” and Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X,” the TV version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Alex Garland’s film “Civil War.” What makes “The Breakup” and “Exit Party” different from other recent civil war speculations is a sense that coming apart might be for the best.

 

Marriage is an oft-used metaphor for the United States, and Andersen, a founder of Spy magazine and a former New York magazine editor in chief, takes it as a starting point. Set largely in 2045, “The Breakup” follows a politically heterogeneous couple, Asher and Natalie, whose separation coincides with America’s national divorce. Part of their rupture stems from their differing attitudes toward what the book calls Disunion. Asher, a Jewish progressive most at home in cities, is basically glad to be rid of the right-wing territories that break away to form the Free American Republic. Natalie, the sort of anti-woke classical liberal who in our time might write for The Free Press, mourns the end of America. Unable to bear their smug San Francisco environs, she decamps to Tennessee, where she grew up.

 

A few things about “The Breakup” irritated me. It’s full of likely anachronisms: I find it easier to believe that the United States will come apart than that people in 2045 will still text one another fire emojis or say “spill the tea” when they mean gossip. The book is also rather too full of pat liberal wish fulfillment. Cut off from blue-state largess, the Free American Republic struggles with economic crisis and emigration. Montana, suffering “secessionists’ remorse,” tries to rejoin a United States that has just elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez president.

 

But I appreciated Andersen’s attention to the banal bureaucratic details of Disunion. There’s a civil war in “The Breakup,” but a relatively small one; Americans just aren’t that dedicated to keeping the nation together. The problems of unwinding the country are primarily logistical, like how to link blue cities in red states — called I.M.R.s, or independent metro regions — to the United States mainland. Many of these questions are handled, in typical American fashion, by lawyers who find in Disunion a lucrative new market.

 

So while national divorce in “The Breakup” is sad and at times gruesome, it’s not completely cataclysmic. In the universe of the novel, the United States is most dystopian when it’s still together.

 

The same is true, more subtly, of Emily St. John Mandel’s “Exit Party.” St. John Mandel wrote gorgeously about a postapocalyptic world in “Station Eleven,” her 2014 book about a civilization unraveled by a pandemic. Given that book’s prescience, it’s a little unnerving that she has now written about civil war. “The United States had come undone following a coup d’état,” she tells us on the first page. The story begins with a party in Los Angeles to celebrate the lifting of a curfew in the newly independent California Republic.

 

St. John Mandel’s post-civil-war America is a brutal place. Los Angeles is full of shantytowns and refugees. In the middle of America, we soon learn, things are worse, as rival militias scrap over territory. Still, there’s hope in the new configuration. “I know countries don’t last forever, and there’s always going to be new ones,” says a guest at the party, “but it feels like a miracle, right?”

 

During the first Trump term, people often said they felt we’d veered onto a bad timeline. “Exit Party” dramatizes that notion, and as the book goes on, it starts to seem that the timeline in which America cracks apart might not be the worst one. “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist,” says one character.

 

Our constitutional system protects us from each other, but its rigidity — the near impossibility of passing constitutional amendments, the structural bias against cities — has also come to feel like a cage. “The Breakup” and “Exit Party” suggest that it’s easier to imagine a future full of possibility outside this system than in it. “It does seem like people are getting increasingly impatient, and I think the novelists are picking up on that,” Richard Kreitner, the author of “Break It Up: Secession, Division and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union,” told me.

 

Kreitner pointed out that stories of disunion proliferated during other moments of national strife. He wrote in Slate that years before the Civil War, Southerners wrote novels about secession and sectional bloodshed. Amid the upheavals of the 1970s, there was another spate of books imagining the end of the United States, including “Ecotopia,” about a breakaway West Coast environmental paradise, and the white supremacist “The Turner Diaries,” which continues to inspire the far right.

 

Fiction doesn’t necessarily show us the future, but it can be an early warning system, one that detects volatile, taboo longings well before they turn into a political program. There’s probably no way for red and blue America to get free of each other, not without a level of bloodshed and ruination that would leave everyone far worse off than we are now. If fantasies of ending the union look tantalizing, though, it’s a sign of how loveless it’s become.

The Message Behind Trump’s Threats of ‘Economic Warfare’ Against Iran

 

News Analysis

The Message Behind Trump’s Threats of ‘Economic Warfare’ Against Iran

 

President Trump’s threats of an “economic D-Day” carry a clear signal to Iran that he does not want to go back to war.

 

Anton Troianovski Alan Rappeport

By Anton Troianovski and Alan Rappeport

Aug. 20, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/world/europe/trump-iran-economy-sanctions-threats.html

 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure investors worried about the pressure campaign on Iran on Thursday, declaring that a resumption of “large-scale” fighting was unlikely.

 

The problem for the Trump administration is that Iran was also listening.

 

President Trump this week promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran, a “crushing” operation to “cripple” Iran. The U.S. clampdown is formidable, a combination of wartime destruction, a naval blockade and sanctions that have already put the Iranian economy under more pressure than its regime has experienced in decades.

 

But between the lines of the administration’s threats was a signal that Mr. Bessent made as clear as ever on Thursday: Mr. Trump does not want to go back to war right now. The president is waging an economic campaign against Iran having already spent weeks bombing the country earlier this year, and having stepped back from multiple threats since then to resume the violence.

 

As a result, experts say, Mr. Trump is stuck in a conflict with limited leverage, a demonstrated vulnerability and an emboldened adversary. Even as Iran reels from shortages and inflation, Mr. Trump is likely to increasingly feel the pressure of the approaching midterm elections in the shadow of an unpopular war and high gas prices. It is a dangerous combination, experts say, that could prompt Iran to sense American weakness and lash out.

 

“They read him now as not wanting to escalate militarily,” Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for presidents of both parties, said of Iran’s leaders. “That creates an incentive for them to show that they may escalate militarily.”

 

Mr. Bessent told CNBC on Thursday that the Treasury Department would hold a news conference about the new measures targeting Iran next Monday. He said traders had been wrong to bid up the price of oil in response, given that the administration’s new economic threats were a sign there would not be an immediate return to full-scale bombing.

 

“If we are doing the maximum economic pressure, then that means that likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart,” Mr. Bessent said. “But I would emphasize, that is for now.”

 

Mr. Trump announced his upcoming “economic D-Day” against Iran in a social media post Wednesday evening, warning of “Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale.”

 

“These maniacs are on the ropes, and these HISTORIC MEASURES will cripple them and their ability to project terror worldwide,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.

 

Among the challenges for Mr. Trump is that he has repeatedly threatened Iran with large-scale destruction, only to pull back from the threat. He spoke in June about his fear of an extended war pushing the United States into an economic “depression.” And polls show the Iran war to be widely unpopular — even, increasingly, among Republicans — creating a political Achilles’ heel for Mr. Trump as a conflict he described as a weekslong “little excursion” nears its six-month mark.

 

Iran’s regime has shown in recent months that it can withstand the large-scale death and destruction meted out by American and Israeli bombs, as well as impose costs on the United States by, among other things, attacking oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. gasoline prices remain more than a dollar a gallon higher than they were before the start of the war, U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf have been severely damaged, 18 American service members have been killed and munitions have run low. Along the way, a deal to end the war has remained elusive — even in terms of a full reopening of the strait.

 

The Iranian resilience and retaliation appear to have pushed Mr. Trump to rely on economic pressure to try to force Iran’s hand. Analysts note that the administration has already imposed extraordinary pain on Iran’s economy, with Mr. Trump’s naval blockade compounding the damage done by this spring’s bombing campaign.

 

A new escalation came on Wednesday when the United Arab Emirates, a crucial economic partner across the Persian Gulf from Iran, said it would halt all trade and financial transactions with the country.

 

Iran’s most important financial lifeline is China, which buys most of Iran’s oil.

 

“China is the indispensable piece” of an economic pressure campaign against Iran, said Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington who previously worked on sanctions policy at the Treasury Department.

 

“No substitute can absorb Iranian crude at China’s scale,” Mr. Maleki added in a text message.

 

But Mr. Trump has worked to improve his relationship with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, who is expected to meet Mr. Trump in Washington on Sept. 24. Analysts said they anticipate that the Trump administration will be cautious in pressuring China, especially given the upcoming summit, leaving open the question of just how much more severe the U.S. economic campaign against Iran can become.

 

Mr. Bessent told CNBC that the administration’s conversations with China on the matter would remain private.

 

“Iran has been under comprehensive sanctions for years,” said Edward Fishman, senior fellow and director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The only major thing left to do is aggressively target Iran’s trading partners — above all, China.”

 

He added: “I’m skeptical Trump is willing to risk instigating an economic war with China right now.”

 

Then there is the question of how Iran would respond under severe financial strain — especially given the widespread recognition that Mr. Trump wants to avoid going back to war.

 

Mr. Ross, the former Mideast envoy, said Iran could be expected to look for a way to put fresh military pressure on the United States or its Gulf allies. And that expectation, in turn, highlights the uncertainty over Mr. Trump’s longer-term strategy as gas prices stay high, the midterms loom and munitions stocks remain low.

 

“I’ve not seen, throughout this process, the ability to think beyond the immediate next step,” Mr. Ross said of the administration’s approach to Iran. “They’re playing checkers. They’re not playing chess.”

 

Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.

 

The all family of Pedro sanchez is rotten to the core

 

The all family of Pedro sanchez is rotten to the core

The family of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is currently at the center of high-profile legal battles and corruption investigations. While the conservative and far-right opposition parties argue that these cases reveal systemic corruption within his inner circle, Sánchez and his supporters maintain that the allegations are part of a politically motivated smear campaign ("lawfare").

The legal situations involving his immediate family members include:

David Sánchez (Brother)

• The Conviction: On July 14, 2026, David Sánchez, a classical musician, was convicted of administrative misconduct by a court in Badajoz.
• The Penalty: He was handed a nine-year ban from holding public office
• The Case: The court ruled that a public-sector musical director role was specifically "tailor-made" for him in 2017 without any genuine administrative or public need. However, the court dismissed the more severe charge of influence peddling, which could have carried prison time.

Begoña Gómez (Wife)

• The Status: Begoña Gómez is facing a jury trial for corruption and influence peddling.
• The Restrictions: In June 2026, an investigating judge ordered her to surrender her passport and barred her from leaving Spain.
• The Case: Following a two-year investigation, she is accused of using her influence as the prime minister's spouse to secure a position at Madrid’s Complutense University and to improperly benefit companies with which she had personal and professional ties. She strongly denies any wrongdoing.

Political Context

These family scandals are compounded by separate investigations into Sánchez’s broader political circle, including a 24-year prison sentence handed down to his former transport minister and right-hand man, José Luis Ábalos, in June 2026 for a pandemic-era face mask kickback scheme.

The opposition, led by the center-right People's Party (PP), has used these developments to demand Sánchez's immediate resignation. Prime Minister Sánchez, who initially came to power in 2018 on an anti-corruption platform, has not been directly implicated or named in any of the cases. He has vowed to defend his family's innocence and intends to serve out his full term until August 2027.

 

Sánchez has one year until Spain’s election deadline. The odds are against him.

 Sánchez has one year until Spain’s election deadline. The odds are against him.

 

The prime minister is still facing heat over the Ceuta crisis and a raft of Socialist Party corruption scandals. An early election could make sense.

 

August 21, 2026 4:00 am CET

By Aitor Hernández-Morales

https://www.politico.eu/article/pedro-sanchez-has-one-year-until-spain-election-deadline-the-odds-are-against-him/

 

We are now one year away from the latest possible date — Aug. 22, 2027 — that Spain can hold a general election.

 

For embattled Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, it looks like it’s going to be a bruising ride to get that far. He insists he will seek reelection, brushing aside the predictions that he is doomed by pointing to his well-established knack for defying political gravity.

 

But this time, the odds are especially stacked against him and his fragile minority government, which has never appeared so isolated.

 

The challenges that lie ahead are so daunting that Sánchez could well chuck the schedule and call for an early vote.

 

Here’s why he’s up against it.

 

Rough rentrée

Summers have historically been kind to Sánchez.

 

In the past, the seasonal break helped reduce the heat generated by crises like the June 2025 arrest of high-ranking Socialist Party official Santos Cerdán for allegedly awarding public works contracts in exchange for kickbacks. The prime minister was no doubt hoping a similar scenario would play out following this spring’s high-profile indictment of his ally, former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, on money-laundering charges, and after a major raid on his party’s headquarters as part of a separate criminal investigation.

 

But just days before he was due to head off on a beach break on the island of Lanzarote, Sánchez’s summer was upended by a surge of 72,000 migrants into Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in northern Africa. Even though the prime minister did eventually resume his scheduled vacation, the Ceuta crisis has continued to dominate the news. Thousands of unauthorized migrants remain in the city, with local authorities complaining Madrid isn’t doing enough to address overwhelmed hospitals and other public services.

 

The government is bound to face tough grillings over security failures, whether intelligence warnings went unheeded and whether something went badly wrong in relations with Morocco. The Ceuta debacle also left Sánchez looking painfully isolated on the EU stage, with 22 leaders writing a letter suggesting his liberal migration policies could have helped attract the influx.

 

Nearly a third of Sánchez’s ministers have been summoned to testify at extraordinary hearings in the Spanish parliament next week, and the prime minister himself is due to face tough questions when plenary sessions resume in September.

 

So much for a fresh start.

 

Budget bloodbath

The fall promises no relief for Spain’s prime minister, who faces defeat in a battle over the national cashflow.

 

The minority government has been unable to pass a single budget bill during this legislative term, and has been operating on the spending plan approved by Sánchez’s previous government in December 2022. The Socialist leader has vowed to submit a draft budget for 2027 this fall, but it is almost certain to be rejected by lawmakers.

 

A major obstacle is the Catalan separatist Together for Catalonia group, whose support is key to getting any legislation passed. The party voted down the deficit framework for the draft budget this summer, with its spokesperson, Josep Rius, characterizing the long-shot legislation as “yet another Sánchez frivolity.”

 

The separatists were instrumental in getting Sánchez a third stint as prime minister in 2023, but relations have since soured, with the party now accusing the government of reneging on its commitments to Catalonia, and refusing to back budget plans it considers to be Madrid-centric.

 

But the prime minister is determined to move forward, raising questions about his motivation to present a doomed budget bill.

 

“There’s growing speculation that Sánchez may want to call voters to the polls as early as March, and the budget’s failure would provide him with an excuse to do so” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, who pointed out that Spain is due to hold local and key regional elections in May 2027.

 

Sánchez’s personal unpopularity has been cited as a key factor in Socialist Party losses in previous local and regional races. Holding national elections earlier in the year could remove the prime minister from the equation when the May vote is held, helping center-left candidates running in key cities and enabling the socialists retain control of regional governments in Castilla-La Mancha, Asturias and Navarre.

 

“There’s no sense in stretching this term to its limits if you’re not only going to lose, but drag others down with you,” Simón said.

 

(More) legal woes ahead

Sánchez’s tumultuous relationship with Spain’s judiciary is also likely to grow even more strained over the next year.

 

In the coming months the prime minister’s wife, Begoña Gómez, could stand trial on charges of influence-peddling and embezzlement. She denies all wrongdoing, and the prime minister has consistently argued that his wife is the victim of so-called “lawfare” targeting his friends and family.

 

Spain’s prime minister sits with his wife Begona Gómez as they attend the 41st congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) at the Palacio de

Gómez’s trial follows on this summer’s conviction of the prime minister’s brother on administrative misconduct charges, in connection to the rigged allocation of a public job — a ruling Sánchez called “unjust.”

 

Beyond the cases involving his immediate family, the prime minister faces potentially damaging judicial probes into alleged bid-rigging and kickbacks involving key allies — as well as an explosive investigation into suspected illegal financing of his Socialist Party.

 

Crucial parliamentary allies such as Gabriel Rufián of the Republican Left of Catalonia have warned that illegal financing is a “red line.” Hard evidence could force Spain’s current prime minister to suffer the same fate as his conservative predecessor, Mariano Rajoy, whom Sánchez ousted from power after his People’s Party was proven to have engaged in the same crime.

 

Left-wing logjam

Spain’s fragmented politics make majority governments increasingly unlikely: Power goes to whoever can secure enough parliamentary support to be declared prime minister.

 

For now, the polling suggests the center-right People’s Party and the far-right Vox party are on course to control a majority of seats in the parliament in 2027. The two parties currently govern in coalition in four Spanish regions, and PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo in June explicitly endorsed a partnership at the national level.

 

Sánchez faces tougher odds in building an alliance strong enough to keep him in power. In 2023, he formed a coalition with the Sumar group — an amalgam of far-left parties — and won the backing of key regionalist and separatist parties.

 

But this time around, the numbers don’t add up. Sumar has effectively collapsed amid internal infighting, and its unifying leader, Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, has ruled out standing as its candidate at the next election. Polls indicate the far left will suffer heavy losses at the national level, leaving Sánchez with fewer viable paths to a parliamentary majority.

 

No relief abroad

There are also signs that Sánchez will no longer be able to boost his fortunes at home through his performances on the global stage.

 

Engagement in international affairs — ranging from his condemnation of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, to his ongoing feud with U.S. President Donald Trump — has previously bolstered his standing in Spain.

 

But political scientist Simón said that the harsh criticism the prime minister from fellow EU leaders for his handling of the Ceuta crisis reveals he is increasingly considered to be a figure on his way out.

 

“As one of the few social democrats still governing in Europe, his positions are out of step with the conservative consensus, and they aren’t taken seriously because he is now seen as a lame duck who is going to lose the next elections,” said Simón.

 

“That leaves him with little capacity to make a difference because he isn’t seen as representing Spain’s position at this point,” he added. “Everyone accepts someone else will be in charge next year, and likely have a very different perspective.”

 

Sánchez’s broader international vulnerabilities will be on display in November, when Madrid hosts a summit of Ibero-American heads of government that will underscore the region’s rightward shift. Roughly half the leaders attending are from the right, and include figures like Argentina’s populist president, Javier Milei, with whom the prime minister has a prickly relationship.

 

“The summit highlights a global political realignment,” said Simón. “One that Spain narrowly avoided in 2023, but seems increasingly inevitable next year".