Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has hailed the Democratic sweep in the US midterm elections as proof that the global far-right wave is crumbling, and predicted that Spain will follow suit in its own election later this month.
Sánchez, the first European leader to respond to the American results, wrote on X on Wednesday that US voters had rejected policies that promote hatred, sexism and climate-change denial. “Yesterday, American society voted against policies that only impoverish. Against hatred. Against sexism. Against climate change denial and against the privileges of the elites,” he wrote.
“It happened in Brazil. It has just happened in the US. And it will soon happen in Spain,” he added, drawing a line from Brazil’s recent election through the American midterms to Spain’s snap general election on November 29.
A message aimed at home
Sánchez named his domestic rivals directly, singling out Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party, and Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party. “The far-right wave that Feijóo and Abascal are trying to ride is no longer growing; it is crumbling,” he wrote.
The comments came a day after Americans voted in the midterm elections on November 3, in which Democrats won control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Sánchez framed the result as a rejection of the politics of division and a vindication of progressive government.
His intervention is also a campaign message. Sánchez called the early election after Congress rejected his decrees addressing Spain’s housing crisis, and the polls currently give a hypothetical coalition of the People’s Party and Vox a majority. A win for his Socialists and their left-wing allies would, by most accounts, be close to a miracle.
A global argument
Sánchez has made the same argument before, after Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory last month, declaring that a global progressive comeback had begun and predicting that Spain would follow. The US result gives him a second data point — and a powerful one.
Whether the American vote translates into Spanish votes is another matter. Spain’s election will be decided by housing, the cost of living and the record of Sánchez’s eight years in office, not by events in Washington. But for a prime minister fighting an uphill campaign, the sight of a far-right wave receding across the Atlantic is, at the very least, a useful story to tell.
