Pedro Sánchez’s Spanish Tango

With the tacit permission of my dear readers, as you are reading these lines this Thursday I will already be in Buenos Aires. From this city — where I was born to Spanish parents — I can see both countries reflected in the same mirror. One lags behind, the other lies ahead in time — but the trajectory, the playbook, the thinking and the methods used by their governments are strikingly similar: Argentina’s recent repeat Peronist administration and Spain’s current socialist leadership.

Here, in the Queen of the Plata, a transitional government has taken shape. If you don’t understand that Javier Milei represents transition, you don’t grasp what’s happening in Argentina. And if you don’t see that Pedro Sánchez is also in transition — one at the start of his uncertain rise, the other at the twilight of his empire — then you are misreading the political moment. Both are transitions, regardless of which one might appear more virtuous to the consumer.

Seeing Spain in convulsion and witnessing the issues that grip it while I watch from Argentina leaves a disturbing impression: we have a problem. A big one. Sooner or later, we will have to resolve it.

Spain, under Sánchez, seems to be drifting away from the liberal democracies of Europe toward, perilously, models of populism from the global South. And from here — where those formulas have already been endured — some observe with perplexity what is happening in the motherland.

Argentina was a pioneer in many of the ideas Sánchez now tries to sell as modern: a large part of the Agenda 2030 was prematurely trialled here during Kirchnerism. Add redistribution without growth, manipulation of official data, constant attempts at social polarization, control of the media, and social assistance as a clientelist machine — we saw all of that here. People held hostage and the state treated as loot. A classic recipe of the most rancid populism.

And Sánchez seems to be applying the same Southern recipe. Ironically, this makes him the most exotic president in Europe. Not exotic because of his origins or ideology — which, by the way, mutates with ease — but because of the way he tries to govern through exception, ignoring the democratic alarms flashing around him.

Meanwhile, the cultural bridges between the two countries remain alive, and they are those bridges that offer some hope. Spaniards who found refuge in Buenos Aires have left us lucid, cross-cultural insights about this deep connection. And Argentines now participating in Spanish cultural and political life bring learnings that could serve as warnings. Beacons, if you will.

These contrasts become curious and revealing. It becomes evident that if Spain does not understand it is on a path others have already trod — a path that always ended badly — then it urgently needs help. From here, I would already be lighting that bat-signal in the sky.

What began in the South as a project of social justice ended as a system of institutional capture. And what today in Spain is disguised as progress could end the same way if not corrected in time.

“Spain is my mother and Argentina my wife. You respect the mother, you love the wife.” The phrase, said by Rafael Alberti in exile in Buenos Aires, contains a truth many Spaniards and Argentines feel without having articulated. This dual belonging, this affective yet critical bond, allows one to look from one country into the other with a particular clarity. Argentina for Spain is not a model nor an exaggeration — it is a warning with a name.

Transitions, when not understood and mismanaged, turn into chronic labyrinths from which escape without cost is impossible — and from which exit comes only at a price that could take decades of effort for future generations