In a time of widespread capitulation by the European left—they don't know, they don't answer—and the continent's resounding acceleration toward the far right, Pedro Sánchez seems determined to be the last social democrat. For some time now, he has been practically the only European voice made heard in the face of Donald Trump's onslaught and provocations. And now, just as the right-wing parties here—the PP and Junts—have rejected in the Catalan Parliament the decree that includes the increase in pensions, the president of the Spanish government proposes the extraordinary regulation of all undocumented immigrants who have been in Spain for five months, provided they can prove their status, granting them a residence permit. It seems that there are currently 840,000 immigrants in an irregular situation. And it is perfectly normal in a democratic system to resolve their situation: not only for ethical and humanitarian reasons, which would be sufficient if we weren't all so trapped by our own culture and that of others, but also for basic economic and social integration reasons.

In this era where the spectacle revolves around Trump, his patrons, and his epigones, the question is rarely asked: what about the left? The rightward shift of the right, which brazenly shirks the responsibilities demanded by a democratic society, is generating a conservative radicalization that blurs democratic right-wing politics and brings veritable phantoms to power. But at the same time, another reality that threatens the left-right dialectic upon which European democracies rely seems to go unnoticed: the erosion of social democracy, a cry no one wants to hear. Sánchez's PSOE is one of the last holdouts, at least in its outward appearance, and yet its practice is often closer to the demands of economic liberalism than to the values ​​of classical social democracy. And if we look at the rest of the left, the erosion is becoming increasingly evident.

Is social democracy today simply an obsolete relic of the good old days of Europe's reconstruction after the Second World War? Expressed this way, the question has a provocative component, but it is ultimately legitimate. Analyses of the increasingly clear rise of the far right in the West (the rest of the world is currently operating with other ideological oppositions) modestly conceal the collapse of a social democracy that is no longer explicitly claimed by even the social democrats themselves. There are words in and words out, and this is one of them: just think of the language of the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia or that of the Spanish government. Neither Isla nor Sánchez use the word regularly. Reviled with wrinkled noses by the parody left that believes well-being is a capitulation of higher moral ideals, and also harassed by the extremists who have transformed resentment into a political program and historical amnesia into a long-term strategy, social democracy is going through one of its worst moments. It seems that for many people, social democracy is an exhausted political project, something from bygone days incompatible with the impoverishment of the middle class. There are even those who hold it responsible for a substantial share of the 2007/2008 crisis, having opted for constant and unlimited public debt: a kind of second bubble parallel to that of certain private productive sectors.