Feijóo’s now-or-never moment to lead Spain

MADRID — With his conservative People’s Party comfortably ahead in polls and the Socialist-led government mired in scandals, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has never looked so close to becoming Spain’s prime minister.

In theory, Spain doesn’t need to hold a general election until 2027, but outrage over corruption investigations into the center-left party of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is building to such a fever pitch that the country could well be heading for a snap election.

This weekend, Feijóo will lead an extraordinary convention of his party in Madrid to confirm his position as leader and amplify the idea that he is ready to govern.

“Let’s end this nightmare,” he told supporters as he lambasted Sánchez. “We just want to know when he’s going to sign his resignation letter.”

Removing Sánchez, however, comes down to tight margins in parliamentary alliances. When grilled about why he had not brought a motion of no confidence in the battered government on June 18, Feijóo told Sánchez: “I don’t lack willingness, I lack four votes.”

At the national level, most polls show the People’s Party (PP) leading Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) by a clear margin — echoing the 2023 election. POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts the PP on 34 percent and the Socialists on 27 percent.

“Feijóo knows that it’s now or never, because I don’t think he’ll have another chance like this,” said Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at Barcelona’s Autonomous University. 

Despite winning the most votes in 2023, Feijóo was unable to form a governing majority. Instead, Sánchez managed to bring together a broad coalition of allies — perhaps most critically a handful of small Catalan and Basque parties, which abhor the PP’s strident hostility to separatism and its willingness to engage with the far-right Vox.

The pressures Feijóo faces in Madrid have pushed him to team up with forces further to the right, where he’s found strong allies in attacking the leftist government. Many polls suggest the PP and Vox could together win enough seats in an election to form a majority.

But none of this means Feijóo will find it plain sailing to take power. His own party also has a corrupt image, while he faces stiff competition from within its ranks. Despite the woes of the Socialists, Feijóo may still lack sufficient support to build a governing alliance.

While he certainly has a prime opportunity, nothing is guaranteed.

Socialists under siege

The most recent investigations into corruption have been a gift for Feijóo and his party, who describe the Sánchez government as “a mafia.”

On June 12, Sánchez apologized to Spaniards for having trusted Santos Cerdán, his party’s No. 3, who was implicated by audio recordings in a kickbacks-for-contracts scheme. The affair also triggered an investigation into another former senior Socialist and Sánchez ally, José Luis Ábalos, who had been transport minister. Cerdán, who denies involvement in the scheme, has been placed in preventive custody.

The recordings included sordid discussions about prostitutes and apparent evidence that Sánchez’s allies had rigged voting when he won the PSOE primary in 2014.

Meanwhile, other recordings seemed to show party operative Leire Díez offering favorable treatment to a businessman in exchange for damaging information about the Civil Guard unit probing individuals close to Sánchez, including his wife and brother. Díez says she was gathering material for a book.

Regardless of the revelations, the prime minister has refused to resign or bring forward elections, arguing that the scandals are isolated cases and that he is keeping an extremist opposition out of power. 

As long as his delicate parliamentary majority remains in place, there is little Feijóo can do to oust him.

Swinging too far right?

Feijóo, 63, took the reins of the party in 2022 as a seasoned moderate who had won four elections in a row in the northwestern region of Galicia, a PP stronghold. 

He has launched fierce attacks on the government for its willingness to engage with separatists and push through an amnesty law to benefit the pro-independence Catalans, which form a critical part of the fragile Sánchez coalition. 

Facing pressure from the right-wing media, Vox and PP colleague Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Madrid region and a potential competitor, Feijóo has variously described Sánchez as a caudillo — meaning “strongman,” a term used to refer to dictator Francisco Franco — “an international embarrassment” and “a veritable threat to democracy.”

He has also taken this combative approach to Brussels, where the PP unsuccessfully tried to block the appointment of Spanish Socialist Teresa Ribera as European commissioner. In May, the PP successfully campaigned to thwart a Spanish government effort to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official EU languages — an important promise Sánchez made to the nationalist parties in his coalition.

“Feijóo underwent a process of radicalization and now his position is one of a classic Madrid conservative leader,” said Bartomeus, who says he has still not won over many traditional PP voters. “But when you spend every moment warning of the apocalypse and then the apocalypse doesn’t come, you start to have a problem.”

Frustrated, Feijóo has even floated the possibility Sánchez committed fraud in the 2023 general election. Pointing to apparent irregularities in the 2014 Socialist primary, he said: “If you’ve already robbed a jewelry store, why not rob a bank?”

Such comments have drawn claims that the PP leader has strayed into the territory of Vox further to the right.

“Feijóo is two interviews away from saying that the Earth is flat and vaccines kill,” said left-wing commentator Esther Palomera.

No strangers to scandal

The longer the famously resilient Sánchez digs in, the less time remains for Feijóo.

That’s partly due to the high stock of two of his rivals in the PP: hard-line maverick Ayuso and the moderate president of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, both seen as potential threats to take the leadership.

And that’s before we even get to the corruption problem within Feijóo’s own party.

Sánchez took power in 2018 by removing the scandal-plagued PP of Mariano Rajoy from government. The judicial fallout from that era continues, with several cases involving conservative politicians still being processed. 

In the spring of 2026, the “Operation Kitchen” case is due to come to trial, with former senior PP figures facing accusations of orchestrating a deep-state operation to destroy damaging evidence against the party. The trial could cement the idea that graft plagues both mainstream parties, bolstering the far right in polls.

Meanwhile, the Socialists have reminded Spaniards of Feijóo’s former friendship with a notorious Galician drug trafficker, Marcial Dorado. In 2013, photos were published of the men on vacation together in the 1990s. Feijóo has never explained the circumstances of the relationship.

Instead, he embraced the idea of being someone to whom success does not necessarily come easily.

“Today, I tell you with all humility that I am better than the politician who achieves his objectives the first time around,” he said recently.

Time is running out for him to prove that remains the case.