Pedro Sánchez has regained the leadership of Spain’s bitterly divided Socialist party seven months after being ousted in a coup that laid bare the faultlines within the PSOE and left its status as the main opposition party in jeopardy.



On Sunday night, Sánchez took 50% of the vote, sailing past his main rival, Susana Díaz, the president of the PSOE stronghold of Andalucía, who took 40%. The former Basque president Patxi López finished third with 10%.

The PSOE has been in the hands of a caretaker administration since October, when Sánchez stepped down after powerful factions within the party rebelled against his refusal to allow Mariano Rajoy’s conservative People’s party (PP) to form a government.

Despite huge internal and external pressure, Sánchez insisted the PP was simply too corrupt to run the country.

Following his resignation, the PSOE abstained from Rajoy’s investiture debate, returning the PP to office and ending the 10-month political stalemate that had left Spain without a government after two inconclusive general elections.

Sánchez has spent the past few months criss-crossing the country, addressing the PSOE’s grassroots supporters and urging the party to move to the left.

He hailed his victory as an example of “democracy, participation and transparency” and vowed to make the PSOE a credible winning party once again.



“To the millions of progressives who may or may not have voted Socialist, we say the PSOE will be an effective opposition, and one that defends the social majority who are sick of PP corruption and who are suffering job insecurity and inequality as a result of the PP’s cuts,” he said.

A further recent slew of corruption scandals involving former senior PP figures in Madrid’s regional government has served to vindicate Sánchez’s stance.

But the bickering and disarray in the PSOE’s ranks has also allowed the anti-austerity Podemos party to seize the political initiative – and increase the pressure on its socialist rivals – by calling for a vote of no confidence in what it describes as Rajoy’s “parasitic” and corrupt government.

Díaz, who was backed by party heavyweights including the former PSOE prime ministers Felipe Gónzalez and José Luis Zapatero, had called for a more pragmatic approach to dealing with the PP and blamed Sánchez’s attempts to forge alliances with Podemos and the centrist Ciudadanos party for the PSOE’s worst general elections results since Spain’s return to democracy.

Antonio Barroso, an analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo Intelligence, said Sánchez would struggle to unite a PSOE still reeling from months of infighting.



PSOE candidate Susana Díaz concedes defeat to Pedro Sánchez at the party’s headquarters in Madrid. Photograph: Javier Lizon/EPA

“You’ve had a very bitter fight – including the ouster of Sánchez – and he’s also burned a lot of bridges internally,” said Barroso.

He added that although opinion polls suggested Sánchez would be the PSOE’s best bet as leader in a general election, the party’s internal troubles remained a huge liability.

“That’s the paradox for Sánchez: even though opinion polls make him the most competitive candidate for the Socialist party, the internal divisions of the Socialist party handicap him electorally,” said Barroso.

“Voters don’t like divided parties and if he’s not able to unite the party, he won’t be able to effectively use the supposed popularity that opinion polls have given to him.”

Rajoy, said Barroso, would remain in a strong position as long as the Socialists continued to slog it out with each other. While calling snap elections to take advantage of the situation would appear obvious and opportunistic, the prime minister could later use Sánchez’s apparent intransigence as an excuse to send Spain back to the polls.

“He could say: ‘These people are blocking things and trying to create instability.’ That would be a very strong argument to use if he goes for early elections.”



