During his visit to New York, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez told an audience gathered around New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani that progressive governments were proving “another economic model is possible.” The powerful fear them, he said, because “day after day, we show that a different path is possible, and it works.”
Watching from Spain, I found myself agreeing with him.
And then disagreeing.
This is the peculiar experience of watching your prime minister become somebody else’s political hero. Sánchez is having an excellent season abroad. Around the UN General Assembly he has become something of a pin-up for the international progressive set: handsome, articulate, pro-European, unapologetically humane on immigration and capable of completing several consecutive sentences without threatening Greenland.
I understand the attraction. From here, after all, we can see the alternatives too.
The advertisement might read: Wanted: presentable person, preferably under 70. Must believe in democracy, pronounce multilateralism without smirking and acknowledge the existence of facts. Previous experience behaving like an adult, considered an asset.
Tall, dark and handsome optional, although Sánchez has plainly decided it does no harm.
But there is an old warning about prophets and their own lands, and those of us actually living in Sánchez’s might offer an addendum to his admirers abroad:
Don’t confuse the speech with the country.
Sánchez’s economic claims are not invented. Employment is at historic highs. The minimum wage has risen dramatically. Inequality has fallen. Spain has consistently outgrown much of Europe. These are real achievements, and anyone pretending otherwise is engaged in precisely the post-factual politics Sánchez rightly condemns.
But then you try to rent a flat.
Housing is now the problem Spaniards worry about most. House prices have been rising at double-digit rates. Almost half of Spaniards aged 26 to 34 who still live with their parents say they cannot afford to leave. This does at least provide them with somewhere comfortable from which to read about the remarkable success of the Spanish economy, assuming their parents haven’t changed the Wi-Fi password.
There are, it turns out, several definitions of an economy working. This is what disappears somewhere over the Atlantic.
Macroeconomics matters, but nobody lives in the macroeconomy. We live in apartments. We buy groceries. We wait for doctors. We collect wages and pay electricity bills. A government can tell us, truthfully, that GDP is growing faster than France’s and discover that the thirty-year-old sleeping in his childhood bedroom remains strangely unmoved.
Sánchez has been in power for eight years. Familiarity has done what familiarity generally does to prophets.
The remarkable thing is that his opponents have hardly made the task difficult. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative Partido Popular, possesses the political charisma of a couch in a dentist’s waiting room. Beyond him to the right stands Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, an anti-establishment tribune whose adult working life has been spent overwhelmingly inside politics, political appointments and associated organizations. Spain has not exactly forced Sánchez to compete against Lincoln and Roosevelt.
Yet the far right grows.
That should interest people outside Spain. Because Sánchez can be right about the economy and still lose the argument about how life feels.
Mark Carney should pay attention. His Davos speech earlier this year was extraordinary: intelligent, coherent, serious. Watching it from Europe, one could almost feel an international audience experiencing the unfamiliar pleasure of being addressed as adults. In an age when the leader of Canada’s enormous neighbor discusses annexation as though browsing property listings, competence itself has acquired sex appeal.
But look underneath Carney’s healthy approval ratings and the Spanish warning begins to flicker. Only around 37 per cent of Canadians in one recent poll approved of his handling of the cost of living and inflation. His strongest marks came from managing relations with the United States.
Trump helped make Carney. Trump cannot forever sustain him. Eventually Canadians will stop asking whether their prime minister can stand up to Washington and return to the less glamorous question of whether they can afford Toronto.
Andy Burnham should pay attention too. His early emphasis on electricity bills, bus fares and devolving power is precisely the sort of gloriously mundane politics this moment requires. A £2 bus fare is difficult to turn into a platitude.
But Burnham is two months into the job. Sánchez has been governing for eight years. We know something in Spain about the short journey from insurgent to incumbent.
Which brings me back to Mamdani.
Of all the politicians currently making the progressive international pilgrimage, he may understand the danger best. His administration has actually embraced the phrase “pothole politics.” New York filled 229,000 of them in the fiscal year covered by his first management report. There is something almost revolutionary about its dullness. Potholes cannot be deported. There is no Great Replacement theory of damaged asphalt. Somebody fills the hole or somebody doesn’t.
Mamdani talks about rent, childcare, buses, groceries and housing because he understands something the Democratic Party should study carefully, particularly its younger generation around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: opposing Trump is necessary. It is not sufficient. Neither is speaking in complete sentences. Because if democratic governments cannot make people’s lives feel better, somebody else will explain why they don’t.
And his explanation will be much easier.
The immigrant did it.
The refugee did it.
The foreign worker did it.
The person receiving benefits did it.
Living in Spain makes this mechanism painfully familiar. The new right has understood something ancient about political anger: it requires a direction.
And the safest direction is down.
The tenant is encouraged to inspect the migrant beside him rather than the landlord above him. The worker is told to resent the foreigner willing to work for less rather than the employer willing to pay him less. The patient waiting eight hours in casualty is invited to count the immigrants in the waiting room rather than the missing doctors. The benefits claimed by a refugee receive forensic examination. The tax arrangements of a billionaire remain strangely out of focus.
Never mind monopoly power, private equity buying housing, weakened labor power or the techno-oligarchs accumulating not only extraordinary wealth but increasing control over the platforms on which citizens are taught whom to blame. Those questions suffer from a political defect. They direct the eye upwards.
Much safer to investigate the Moroccan.
So when I see Sánchez applauded in New York, I don’t think the applause is misplaced. Many of his achievements deserve it. His insistence on treating migrants as human beings deserves it too. In a political culture increasingly intoxicated by cruelty, simple decency should not be dismissed merely because the bar has fallen.
But it isn’t enough.
That is the warning Spain offers.
Abroad, politics is conducted in nouns: democracy, dignity, solidarity, multilateralism. At home it is conducted in things: rent, buses, hospital appointments, electricity bills, wages, groceries and the pothole outside your house.
A voter can applaud your defense of democracy on Tuesday and curse you over his rent on Wednesday. There is no contradiction in this.
He has simply gone home.
Carney should remember that. Burnham should remember it. Mamdani seems already to understand it. And the Democrats watching him, particularly those imagining what comes after Trump, should tattoo it somewhere discreet.
Not the fascist is not a program of government. People have to feel the difference. Because if progressives cannot make their lives better, the men waiting on the other side do not actually have to.
They only have to deliver the culprit.
Here in Spain, they are already taking names
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