Rage against Pedro Sanchez is tearing Spain apart

Bloomberg

Spaniards are getting really worked up about Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. At one point last month, the defaced image of the photogenic Socialist was plastered across a giant red banner hung in downtown Madrid.
The trigger has been his widely-criticised handling of the coronavirus pandemic that has seen Spain suffer among the highest death tolls in Europe. But as the worst of the trauma starts to fade, the vitriol has only gotten worse.
The country is emerging from its three-month lockdown now. But the backlash in the capital is growing — one penthouse has been raining down anti-government leaflets on protesters gathered in the street below.
The anger is palpable on social media feeds and in parliament, where 48-year-old Sanchez scraped together enough votes to extend his state-of-emergency powers this week with the furious opposition dredging up his coalition partner’s ties to Venezuela to paint the prime minister as a wannabe authoritarian.
“We’re fighting for Spain,” said Jose Luis Marin as he led a few dozen pan-banging marchers through one of the capital’s swankiest neighbourhoods. He was brandishing a 3-metre long Spanish flag with the word “Libertad” — freedom — scrawled across it.
In truth, tensions were always bubbling under the surface and the virus has simply turned up the temperature in Spain’s long-running culture wars.
Broad swathes of the population questioned Sanchez’s legitimacy from the moment he took office. “I’m fascinated by the absolute hatred for Pedro Sanchez in certain parts of the right,” Roger Senserrich, a political scientist based in New Haven, Connecticut, observed on Twitter.
“He’s a pretty normal politician, mediocre in almost everything, just as ambitious as any other leader of a national party and probably just as (in)competent. But my god, the hatred. It’s brutal.”
A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment.
Spain is a young democracy that emerged from a military dictatorship in late 1970s to become one of Europe’s most thriving and socially liberal economies — and yet its politics remain fiercely partisan with sharp ideological fault lines reminiscent of the US under Donald Trump or Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain. Sanchez is just as polarising. That makes it almost impossible to imagine how its politicians will find common cause as it seeks a path out of a devastating recession.
“The right always tends to be very personal in its attacks,” said Ignacio Urquizu, a sociologist and former Socialist lawmaker. “It focuses on the leader.”
The images from the US over the past week show how quickly order can break down when you put together longstanding divisions, acute economic hardship and a burning sense of injustice. To be sure, Spain has seen nothing like the Black Lives Matter protests as yet, but it has some of the same ingredients. And a few of its own. For many of the conservative voters who make up about a third of the Spanish electorate, Sanchez’s original sin was to forge an alliance with the radical left group Podemos and the separatists of Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Those groups came together in a 2018 no-confidence vote to oust the center-right People’s Party, which had been limping along since losing its majority three years earlier.