Pedro Sánchez of Vox: "My name has ruined the country"

BarcelonaPedro Sánchez is Vox's main political enemy, as has been demonstrated once again in the Aragonese elections. But not everyone who shares the Spanish president's name is a rival of the far right, as the recently appointed deputy coordinator of the party in the province of Tarragona must often remind us. His name, Pedro Sánchez, does not go unnoticed, and he is one of the figures climbing the ranks within the party with only a year to go before the municipal elections. However, the namesake of the Spanish prime minister has not recently made a political appearance. In a conversation with ARA, this Tarragona native, originally from the historic center and born in 1962, recalls his time with Unió from 1991 to 1995, before joining Ciutadans during the height of the Catalan independence movement—where he served as a city councilor from 2015 to 2019, as the number two to the aforementioned figure in Vox "a year ago." Anti-immigration rhetoric and a "commitment to the middle class and workers" are the reasons that led him to embrace the far right.

"Martínez, my second surname, distinguishes me from Pedro Sánchez, 'the bad guy,'" he emphasizes. He recounts a recent incident: "I went to renew my ID and driver's license two months ago, and when they said Pedro Sánchez, everyone turned around." "I'm sometimes afraid, wondering if someone is going to attack me," he asserts, half-laughing, and maintains that he hasn't had "any problems," but rather "anecdotes." When he hears insults directed at Pedro Sánchez at various national festivals, he has mixed feelings: "They're chanting my name, calling him a son of a bitch. My name will go down in history because he's ruined the country," he exclaims. And what happens within his own party? "Every day when a Vox colleague introduces me, they say, 'It's Pedro Sánchez, but he's not the bad guy,'" he states.

Multivoter

He started in Unió as a young man and later admits to having voted for "PSC and PP," before ending up in Cs and now in Vox. Despite having been a member of a nationalist party, he maintains that he has never professed this ideology and that he only wanted to "work for the people" because "closed nationalism is not good." "I changed parties to be true to my ideas," he says. He describes himself as a "populationist" and recounts how he became "disenchanted" with self-government to the point of rejecting it. Now he works in out-of-hospital emergency services driving ambulances and is in favor of "taking to the streets" in politics and "denouncing what no one denounces, like insecurity and immigration."

A father of two, he has been a casteller (human tower builder) since 1966, when he was only four years old. From the Tarragona Children's group, he was a founder and group leader of the Vila-seca Children's group in the 1990s. "In castells (human towers), there are all kinds of people. Before, there were more problems [because of the independence movement], but not anymore. It's about closing ranks and climbing higher," he says. An admirer of Santiago Abascal, he has nothing but good things to say about his former party colleague Viñuales, "as a person," with whom he'd "make a frying pan."