Spanish leaders seek godparents outside: who goes with whom?

MadridAt a time when international politics is in the spotlight, Spanish leaders are seeking godfathers abroad to strengthen themselves internally and try to win the electoral game. The Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, is the one with the most blatant strategy in this regard, by positioning himself as one of the leaders of the world left this weekend in Barcelona, but other political spaces also go beyond borders to seek references. These days, the PP and Vox have demonstrated this with the reception of María Corina Machado – whom they use to attack the Spanish government – and a few days ago it was Viktor Orbán's defeat in Hungary that marked Spanish politics.

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Pedro Sánchez

With a complex internal policy –although Tuesday's CIS gave them the largest projected vote of the legislature–, the PSOE is playing the international policy card to the fullest. The priority is to forge alliances with Latin America and Europe, as well as to approach China and African countries, in order to reduce dependence on Donald Trump's United States. For this reason, Pedro Sánchez celebrates the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur as effusively as he can, and this weekend at the progressive summit in Barcelona he ensured that there was representation from the left from all continents.

Who stands out among these allies? The president of Brazil, Lula da Silva; the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro; the former president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, or the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum. It also counts on the Democratic Party of the United States, with a much-applauded intervention by the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, via teleconference. Montse Mínguez, spokesperson for the PSOE, congratulated herself on Saturday's conclave, stating that while they meet with "democrats," the PP is responsible for including the far-right in the government of Extremadura, alluding to the PP-Vox agreement.

Regarding the European left, Sánchez counted on the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, as a leading figure, which according to The Irish Times annoyed the Irish executive, of a neoliberal character, because it preferred her first visit to be to the United Kingdom. Connolly, like Sánchez, is a politician critical of NATO and who has spoken openly of "genocide" in Gaza. On the other hand, the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, who is a social democrat, was not present, nor was the British Prime Minister, the Labourite Keir Starmer, who sent his Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy.

Yolanda Díaz

From the summit between Spain and Brazil in Barcelona, a scene stood out that caught the attention: when Pedro Sánchez was parading alongside Lula da Silva at the Palau de Pedralbes, the Brazilian president broke protocol to go and greet the Spanish vice president and until recently leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz. And it is that she had traditionally been a benchmark for Sumar and continues to be so despite her approach to the PSOE and the governmental summit in defense of democracy, which Sánchez and Lula da Silva were jointly promoting. It is the same that has happened to the left of the PSOE with Boric or Petro, as Sánchez is monopolizing all international attention.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo

While Sánchez boasts about these alliances, the PP considers that the Spanish president “is on the wrong side of history” by aligning himself with “the most radical left in the entire planet and with populists”. This was expressed this Monday by the popular party's number two, Miguel Tellado, who claimed that, in contrast, his party has focused on the “successful” visit of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado to Spain. The anti-Chavista figure, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, avoided meeting with the Spanish government and surrounded herself with visible figures from the PP, who in recent days have welcomed her with honors at the party's national headquarters as well as at those of the City Council, the Community of Madrid, and the Senate.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Pedro Rollán, and also former Spanish president José María Aznar, this very Monday, have met with her. “My affections and preferences, I believe, are very clear,” Machado said at an informative breakfast prior to the meeting with the president of FAES, who has become an anti-Sánchez symbol. It was precisely a regular critic of Sánchez within the PSOE, such as former Spanish executive leader Felipe González, who was in charge of introducing Machado at the informative breakfast. The fight for ‘liberty,’” González emphasized, “is not the heritage of one ideology,” although in Spain, Machado's has adopted a very specific bias.

Beyond the Venezuelan opposition, which is the most evident case of alignment, Feijóo defends Spain's traditional alliances with the Western world and with the leaders of the European People's Party (EPP). The president of the Spanish PP has claimed as his own the recent victory of Péter Magyar in Hungary and, in recent years, has praised the models of other conservative presidents or prime ministers such as Greece's Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Poland's Donald Tusk, or Portugal's Luís Montenegro. The latter was one of the most prominent international guests at the PP congress that re-elected Feijóo last July, along with the EPP leader, Germany's Manfred Weber. The popular party, which sees the Church as a traditional ally, observes how the confrontation between Leo XIV and Trump has led the PSOE and the space to its left to also claim the Pope.

Santiago Abascal

The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, also met with Machado, but maintaining a much lower profile than the PP. Abascal's alliances are framed within the networks of the global and European far-right, mainly through the formation Patriots for Europe, led by the president of Vox. The most relevant alliance is with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and, by extension, with the President of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Abascal has openly defended despite the attacks on the Palestinian population. In Latin America, the harmony is maximum with the Argentine president, Javier Milei, and there is a good "friendship" with José Antonio Kast, the far-right president of Chile.

Regarding the European alliance, it has lost one of its pillars, the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, but the role of the French Marine Le Pen stands out, although her leadership of the National Rally is also affected by the judicial conviction for embezzlement. Abascal also boasts of friendship with the Italian Giorgia Meloni, despite her having distanced herself from Patriots for Europe and being part of another group in the European Parliament, European Conservatives and Reformists.