Pedro Sánchez faces challenge in 2024 to keep fragile majority together

Visitors to the local government’s headquarters in the Real Casa de Correos in central Madrid are invited to leave a festive message beneath the Christmas tree that adorns the building. Most of these notes tend to be good-hearted wishes for a happy holiday. But this year, one handwritten message stood out. “May Pedro Sánchez be killed,” it read, followed by: “Health and happiness.”

This wish for the Socialist prime minister’s death is entirely in keeping with the tone of Spanish politics in 2023, which has lurched from fierce polarisation to toxic entrenchment. Sánchez has been a lightning rod for the right-wing opposition, which has cast him as an enemy of Spain who gleefully undermines the country’s democratic institutions and aligns himself with separatists in order to cling to power. Conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo promised to roll back what he and others on the right call Sanchismo if he won July’s general election.

Núñez Feijóo did win, but parliamentary arithmetic meant that it was Sánchez who formed a new government. Having already relied on Basque and Catalan nationalists to keep his coalition afloat during the last legislature, this time he went further. In order to secure the support of the hardline pro-independence Together for Catalonia (JxCat) party, Sánchez’s Socialists agreed to an amnesty that would benefit more than 300 Catalan nationalists facing legal action for separatist activity.

That amnesty has dominated Spanish politics in recent months, with the opposition – and some veteran Socialists – deeming it unconstitutional and a threat to territorial unity. It will remain a major theme in 2024, as it still has to go through parliament and face a barrage of legal challenges before it can be implemented, in the middle of the year at the earliest. By far the most contentious beneficiary of the amnesty would be JxCat’s Carles Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium after leading a failed secession attempt in 2017, from where he has waged a campaign of propaganda against Spain’s democratic credentials.

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Núñez Feijóo’s Popular Party is already treating Sánchez’s new left-wing coalition as illegitimate; the far-right Vox, meanwhile, frequently describes him as a traitor and coup-monger

The amnesty bill’s presentation has already triggered a wave of protests, which at times have turned violent as the far right has got involved. But the return to Spain of Puigdemont, the bête noire of unionism, would infuriate the right further. Núñez Feijóo’s Popular Party is already treating Sánchez’s new left-wing coalition as illegitimate; the far-right Vox, meanwhile, frequently describes him as a traitor and coup-monger, with its leader Santiago Abascal saying, in comments that appeared to evoke the death of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, that “there will come a moment when the people will want to hang [Sánchez] by his feet”.

Such rhetoric has become relatively commonplace and often helps Sánchez as he warns of a dangerously radical right. However, a more testing conundrum for him could be how to keep his fragile parliamentary alliance together. Puigdemont will agitate for tangible concessions from Madrid as his party seeks to prove that its secessionist credentials remain intact and he has already warned Sánchez of the “unpleasant consequences” if the prime minister should fail to uphold their agreements.

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The junior partner in the governing coalition is Sumar, a broad alliance of leftist parties. Its growing prominence under labour minister Yolanda Díaz has fed a feud with the crisis-ridden Podemos that could generate further turbulence within the governing alliance and has already reinforced the Spanish left’s reputation for infighting.

For the opposition right, Sánchez’s engagement with EH Bildu has been an ongoing cause of outrage – sometimes genuine but more often cynical

More straightforward obstacles lie ahead for the government this year in the shape of European and regional elections. The Socialists’ willingness in Madrid to reach confidence-and-supply deals with nationalists could be significant when elections are held in the north-western region of Galicia in February, where the left hopes to push back the right-wing electoral tide seen in local ballots in 2023.

Elections in the Basque Country could see the Socialists play the role of kingmaker, their support probably allowing their current ally, the moderate Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), to form a new government. However, the more radical EH Bildu, which is seen as the successor to the political wing of defunct terrorist group Eta, has been polling strongly and might attempt to persuade the Socialists to support its bold left-wing social agenda. For the opposition right, Sánchez’s engagement with EH Bildu has been an ongoing cause of outrage – sometimes genuine but more often cynical – and it has sought to present this relationship as proof that the prime minister is virtually in cahoots with terrorists.

Sánchez himself has said that one of his aims this year will be to ensure that EH Bildu and JxCat, with whom he must negotiate, start to be acknowledged as legitimate political actors. That could end up being his stiffest task of all.