A lone battle: Why is Pedro Sánchez the only European leader to take on Trump?
On Wednesday morning, Pedro Sánchez delivered a 10-minute televised address with the rather bland title: “An institutional declaration by the prime minister to assess recent international events.” The speech’s words, however, were anything but beige. Hours after Donald Trump had threatened to cut off trade with Spain over its government’s refusal to allow two jointly operated bases in Andalucía to be used to strike Iran, Sánchez set out his thinking. In doing so, he became one of the very few European leaders to openly and emphatically reject the demands of a US president whose trademark negotiating style is an erratic mix of bullying, humiliation and self-aggrandisement. The thrust of the Spanish prime minister’s argument was that another war in the Middle East would claim numerous lives, further destabilise the world and have dire economic consequences – but many of its paragraphs were unambiguously personal. A government’s overriding duty, said Sánchez, was to protect and improve the lives of its citizens, not to manipulate or profit from global conflicts. “It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this duty use the smokescreen of war to hide their failure and, in the process, line the pockets of a select few – the same ones as always; the only ones who profit when the world stops building hospitals and starts building missiles,” he said. Then came the lines: “It is naive to believe that democracies or respect between nations can spring from ruins. Or to think that practising blind and servile obedience is a form of leadership … We will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world and that is also contrary to our values and interests, simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.” Who “someone” was needed no explanation. Even if Sánchez was preaching to the converted in his speech – according to a recent survey, only 15.7% of Spaniards have a favourable opinion of the US president – his words would still have resonated with the many who were infuriated by the country’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under its then prime minister, José María Aznar.
While Wednesday’s address thrilled Sánchez’s leftwing base, it elicited a predictable response from his political opponents. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, accused the prime minister of playing partisan politics and jeopardising Spain’s relationship with the US. Santiago Abascal, who leads the far-right, pro-Trump Vox party, suggested the decision had been taken by the “ayatollahs” and by a prime minister hellbent on remaining in power, despite a series of corruption scandals facing his inner circle, his socialist party and his administration. But Sánchez’s language, though stark, was hardly out of character. As well as being one of the most vociferous European critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza – he has accused the country of “exterminating a defenceless people” by bombing hospitals and “killing innocent boys and girls with hunger” – he spoke out against the US’s armed toppling of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. He has also bucked global trends by defending and promoting the benefits of immigration at a time when most politicians across the continent prefer radical rhetoric and razor wire. His is an increasingly loud voice, but, for the time being at least, a solitary one. While Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has won plaudits and boosted her profile by rallying European leaders against Donald Trump’s attempt to claim Greenland, Sánchez has not found full-throated support in Europe’s major capitals.
For reasons that are sometimes domestic, sometimes global, sometimes ideological and sometimes practical, his counterparts in Berlin, Paris and Rome have found themselves unwilling or unable to speak out against Trump. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, contacted Sánchez on Wednesday to express France’s “European solidarity” in the face of the US’s trade threats. Macron, who has only one year left in office and is focusing almost entirely on foreign policy, now faces the challenge of trying to de-escalate another international conflict that appears far out of France’s hands.
Paris, which staunchly opposed the US-led 2003 war in Iraq under the then vociferously dissenting president Jacques Chirac, is now walking a tightrope of pragmatism. Macron has been clear in saying that the US and Israeli attacks on Iran did not observe international law. But he has also said that the Iranian leadership bore responsibility by disregarding international law with its nuclear programme, financing terrorist groups and with its human rights abuses. In a televised address on Tuesday, Macron said of the killings of Iran’s supreme leader and top officials: “History never weeps for the executioners of their own people, and none of them will be mourned.”
France has moved its aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the eastern Mediterranean, as well as other anti-air defence capabilities, for what Macron called a “strictly defensive” presence in support of its regional allies, including Cyprus, but also Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE, where France has a sizeable military base. One of France’s top priorities was “working to find a way out of this crisis,” a French official said. It is from Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, however, that Europe has seen rhetoric most sharply differing from Sánchez’s. On Sunday, as he prepared to head to Washington, Merz struck a remarkably conciliatory note in a statement for the cameras at his chancellery in Berlin. “Categorising the events [in Iran] under international law will have relatively little effect,” Merz stated. “Therefore, this is not the time to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their goals without being able to actually achieve them ourselves.” Merz’s stated strategy at the long-planned Oval Office meeting on Tuesday was – taking a page from the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney – to use pragmatism to allow the greatest room for manoeuvre on Europe’s most pressing concerns: Ukraine and the president’s chaotic tariffs. The unpopular chancellor, who is trying to fight off a stiff challenge from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party before five state elections this year while also struggling to revive Europe’s top economy, can ill-afford a frontal collision with Trump.
So when, on Tuesday, shortly after the US president had announced his plans to stop trading with Spain, a reporter offered him an opportunity to defend Spain, Merz instead threw his support behind Trump’s renewed attack on Madrid for refusing to accept Nato’s proposal for member states to increase their defence spending to 5% of their GDP. Merz later told German journalists that he had not wanted to contradict Trump “on the open stage” but that in private talks he had stood up for Spain and the UK (whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, had been derided by Trump in the Oval Office as “no Winston Churchill” and who was forced this week to insist the “special relationship” between the US and UK was still alive). But by then, the diplomatic damage was done, allowing Trump a win in his persistent efforts to drive a wedge between European allies. Commentators back home said that while Merz had earned praise last June for pushing back on some of Trump’s more outrageous statements regarding Ukraine and the second world war, the chancellor’s reticence this time was “shameful”. If Sánchez was casting around for support in his stance on the Iran war, he won’t have been looking to Rome. Italy’s position appears deliberately ambiguous. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has tried to keep one foot in Trump’s camp – often boasting of her personal and political affinity with him – and the other in Europe. This balancing act has become a defining feature of Meloni’s foreign policy. As with Trump’s tariff wars and the war in Gaza, Meloni has been careful not to openly break with Washington, yet equally reluctant to commit Italy to a clearly independent line.
“We are not at war and we do not intend to enter one,” Meloni told the Italian radio station RTL 102.5 on Wednesday. “The situation is worrying, I would say on several fronts. I am concerned about an increasingly evident crisis of international law. The world is increasingly governed by chaos.” On Thursday, however, the defence minister, Guido Crosetto, took a more forthright line, telling the lower house of parliament that the decision to launch the strikes against Iran “of course fell outside, needless to say, the rules of international law”. Crosetto added: “It is a war that was started without anyone in the world knowing. One in which we, like the rest of the world, find ourselves having to manage [the consequences].” Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said Rome had not yet received any US requests to use military bases on Italian soil for operations against Iran, and would evaluate any requests if they were to arrive. In the meantime, Spain’s lonely duel with Washington rumbles on – especially after the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed on Wednesday that Madrid had changed its mind and was now happy to cooperate with the offensive. The suggestion was quickly, and bluntly, dismissed by Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares. “Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal,” he said. “[Leavitt] may be the White House press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m telling her that our position hasn’t changed at all.”
