Sánchez warns a PP-Vox government would set Spain back 40 or 50 years

A warning about a PP-Vox government

On Friday, 23 October, Pedro Sánchez gave an interview to El País at the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz street in Madrid. He argued that a government formed by the Partido Popular and Vox would not be an ordinary change of power. He described it as a genuine involution that would take the country back 40 or 50 years on issues such as abortion, dying with dignity and culture. He said Vox supplies the ideas while the PP supplies the ambition for power.

“A PP government with Vox is not an alternation, it is a genuine involution.”

Castilla y León and the Milei comparison

Sánchez used the regional government of Castilla y León, which is withdrawing subsidies from films it considers ideological, as an example of the risk. He asked who would decide which content counts as ideological and answered that the regional governments would. He called this censorship, the kind of practice Spain lived through under the dictatorship.

“Them. That means censorship, and that is what Spain lived through under the dictatorship.”

Sánchez also accused the PP and Vox of sharing the instruction manual of Argentine president Javier Milei, which he said is built on cuts, slashes and chainsaws. He added that the two parties had not posed for a photo with Milei this week, out of shame.

The 29 November election

Sánchez framed the vote on 29 November, his sixth general election, as a choice between two paths. He said he respects the polls, but predicted that the PSOE would secure a much broader progressive parliamentary majority. El País reported that polls give the right a 15-point lead. Sánchez said the extraordinary thing was not that the far right is advancing, since that happens everywhere, but that Spain has a progressive government.

“Either the past moves forward or Spain moves forward.”

Housing, the general strike and the economy

A general strike has been called, and Sánchez said it was not directed against his government but in favour of all competent administrations finding solutions to housing access. He argued that the government had intervened in the energy market with positive results, and asked why it should not also regulate the housing market. He said a million homes had been built during his mandate and that the key is affordable and protected housing, not sales to vulture funds. He said housing measures had been brought to parliament more than four times and always failed because of the PP, Vox and Junts. He claimed rent in Barcelona had fallen 5% where the state housing law is applied, while rents in Madrid keep rising. On the economy, he said most of the inflation has to do with the war in Iran, which Spain opposed from the start, and that the public pension system is sound.

Ceuta, Ábalos and other issues

On the Ceuta crisis, Sánchez said no service, neither intelligence nor the state security forces, saw the magnitude of what would happen on 30 and 31 July. He named the corruption linked to Ábalos as his biggest error in eight years, saying the mistake was both failing to see it and allowing it to happen. On the pardon question for former attorney general Álvaro García Ortiz, he said the government and a broad part of Spanish society consider the ruling unjust, and that it will decide once the procedure is closed. He also said José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is an asset for the PSOE and that the party will talk to him about a possible role in the campaign.