Sánchez's progressive pragmatism offers Burnham a model but Spain's context is not Britain's

Pedro Sánchez has done something that eludes most European centre-left leaders: he has stayed in power. Eight years after ousting Mariano Rajoy through a vote of no confidence, the Spanish prime minister remains in La Moncloa, having delivered a legislative programme that would have been unthinkable when he first won the PSOE leadership in 2014 as a compromise centrist. For Andy Burnham, installed in Downing Street less than three months ago with a general election due by 2029, the Spanish precedent is unavoidable. The question is whether the mechanics of Sánchez's survival translate across the Pyrenees.

The road trip that remade a politician

Sánchez's first stint as PSOE leader ended in humiliation. After electoral drubbings in 2015 and 2016, party grandees forced him out in a televised coup. His response was neither resignation nor retreat. He squeezed his 6ft 3in frame into a Peugeot and drove across Spain, telling anyone who would listen: "I'll get in my car and travel all round Spain to listen to those who haven't been listened to, to the grassroots members and left-wing voters." The performance worked. By summer 2017 he was leader again; by June 2018, prime minister.

The transformation was calculated. As Eoghan Gilmartin, a journalist based in Madrid, puts it: "He's not necessarily a committed left-winger, but Sánchez understands that anchoring his party to the left and positioning himself as the leader of a wider progressive bloc is where he can govern. He's a very impressive pragmatist." That pragmatism produced a 2019 pledge to implement hundreds of progressive measures. Most have been enacted: the minimum wage has risen sharply, abortion access has been extended, so-called gay conversion practices are banned, rent increases are capped, and a wealth tax on the richest households sits alongside tax cuts for lower earners. Billions have flowed into renewables.

Governing without a majority

Delivery has not come easily. Sánchez leads a minority coalition with Sumar, the left-wing alliance that succeeded Unidas Podemos. Since 2023 the government has failed to pass a single budget, relying on rolling extensions and ad hoc parliamentary arithmetic. Corruption allegations have circled the prime minister's inner circle: his brother, his wife Begoña Gómez, and former aides have all faced judicial scrutiny, dismissed by Sánchez as politically motivated smears. The PSOE has lost a string of municipal and regional elections. Yet the prime minister's position holds, partly because the right remains fractured between the People's Party and the hard-right Vox, and partly because Sánchez has moved the battlefield.

Foreign policy as domestic insulation

When domestic legislation stalls, Sánchez goes global. Over the past year he has become the most vocal European critic of Israeli military operations in Gaza, labelling them "genocide" and describing Europe's response as a "failure". In 2024 Spain formally recognised a Palestinian state. He refused US requests to use jointly operated bases for strikes on Iran, declaring: "You cannot answer one illegality with another, because that is how the great catastrophes of humanity begin." In April he hosted a high-profile progressive summit in Barcelona, gathering left-wing leaders from across the continent.

"His foreign policy has taken on a much more important role, showing that [he leads] a government with life," says Gilmartin. The strategy serves two purposes: it energises a progressive base that might otherwise drift to Sumar or abstain, and it frames Sánchez as the indispensable bulwark against a rightward shift in Europe. Whether it compensates for parliamentary paralysis at home is the question Spanish voters will answer next year.

Immigration: the Ceuta test

The clearest contrast with Burnham lies in migration. One of Sánchez's first acts in 2018 was allowing the Aquarius, carrying 629 people rescued off Libya, to dock in Valencia after Italy and Malta refused. Since then his government has regularised tens of thousands of undocumented migrants, many of them Moroccan seasonal workers. When 72,000 people crossed into Ceuta in a single month this summer, a figure confirmed by Spanish interior ministry data, Sánchez neither pandered to the right nor bowed to pressure from European partners demanding tighter borders.

The political reward is measurable. In January only 3.9% of Spaniards told the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas that immigration was the country's main problem. By June, after the Ceuta surge, the figure had risen to just 4.8%. The Eurostat migration statistics for Spain show a consistent pattern: irregular arrivals fluctuate, but immigration rarely tops the public agenda. Sánchez's calculation, that a managed, rights-based approach neutralises the issue, has so far held.

Climate: no apology for action

On climate the divergence is sharper still. Burnham's most visible environmental intervention as prime minister has been a ban on disposable barbecues in public parks. Sánchez, by contrast, has declared that "climate change kills" and backed the rhetoric with billions in green transition spending, from offshore wind auctions to rail freight corridors. "There's no sense here that you apologise for being proactive and progressive on climate," Gilmartin notes. The Spanish government's European Commission recovery plan allocation, the largest in the EU at 163 billion euros, devotes more than 40% to climate objectives, a commitment that survives changes in the parliamentary arithmetic.

The progressive vote: absorption not competition

Sánchez's left flank has collapsed. When he first became PSOE leader, Podemos polled up to 26%. Today it hovers at 3%. Sumar, his coalition partner, has also shed support. The prime minister has effectively absorbed the progressive electorate by delivering the policies those parties campaigned on. Burnham might study the British mirror image: in the 2026 English local elections Labour lost nearly four times as many voters to the Greens as to Reform UK. Starmer's strategy of attacking the left while offering vague "patriotic renewal" emptied the centre without filling it.

The lesson is not simply "move left". Sánchez moved left because the Spanish party system rewarded it: a fragmented right, a proportional electoral law that makes coalition governance normal, and a left-wing electorate that turns out when offered concrete gains. Britain's first-past-the-post system, a consolidated right-wing vote under Reform, and a Labour Party still haunted by the Corbyn era create different incentives. Burnham's "Manchesterism", deliberately vague, locally rooted, was designed for a mayoralty, not a general election.

Burnham's silence on the wedges

Since entering Number 10 just before the summer recess, Burnham has said almost nothing on immigration or climate, the two issues that most sharply divide progressives from the right. His day-one pledge to end homelessness generated headlines but no legislative programme has followed. The contrast with Sánchez's first summer is stark: within weeks the Spanish prime minister had docked the Aquarius, appointed a feminist cabinet, and opened the door to Catalan dialogue. Burnham's team argues he is "listening" and "building consensus". Sánchez listened from a moving car; he built consensus by governing.