Spanish rebellion: European leaders who say no to Trump

At the heart of Spain’s government, located on a leafy campus in Madrid, aides to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez were reading an intelligence report last December that assessed President Trump was preparing a path to war with Iran. When he analyzed the bad consequences for Europe’s energy supply and economy, he already knew that no matter Trump’s response, his bosses would rail loudly against it.

For the past year, much of Europe has been blindly following Trump. Sanchez is testing an alternative strategy: the “just say no” principle of Trump diplomacy. He’s betting that the Western alliance would be healthier if America’s allies openly expressed their disagreements with the president, rather than skirting around them.

As US-Israel war with Iran As shock waves spread throughout the global economy, Sanchez, a telegenic 54-year-old socialist, adopted the simple slogan of “No a la Guerra,” or “No to war.” Unlike others in Europe, they have refused to let the US military use their country’s airports for combat, despite Trump’s anger.

Spain, rarely the center of gravity in European affairs, has become the standard-bearer for Europeans frustrated by the continent’s fear of standing up to the American president. Trump’s threat on Greenland And the unpopularity of the Iran war among voters has brought more Europeans to his position.

Sanchez told The Wall Street Journal, “Good partners are like good friends. No matter what, we tell each other the truth.” in an interview The headquarters of the government in La Moncloa. “In my view, this war in Iran is a big mistake for the world and therefore for America.”

“In a world where decisions are driven more and more by impulse, from Spain we offer the opposite: we offer predictability,” he said. (You can watch the full interview at the end of this article.)

Most European leaders have spent the past year trying to win Trump’s ear through deference and flattery — only to have their concerns sidelined as the White House makes decisions with huge global consequences.

His restraint appears to be one of the casualties of the Iran war. Some of them are now moving toward Sanchez’s approach, rejecting Trump’s pressure to help NATO allies Reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said, “Germany is not part of this war, and we do not want to be part of it either.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said, “Italy is not taking any part and does not intend to do so.” Both conservative leaders are seen as among Trump’s close friends in Europe.

Being nice to Trump is becoming increasingly unpopular on the continent. A Polling Europe survey released in February found that 25% of Europeans now see the US as a friendly power, down from 61% two years ago. In Spain, 77% of voters in a December YouGov poll disapproved of Trump, who had threatened to impose sanctions on Spain if it did not increase defense spending.

“Spain has been terrible,” Trump told reporters at the White House in early March. “We’re going to stop all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

The controversy has been good for Sanchez, whose domestic popularity had waned after eight years in office. Beyond Trump, he has clashed with Elon Musk, vowing to hold the X boss and other social-media leaders accountable “if their algorithms poison our society.” He is one of Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Spain was the only member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to reject Trump’s demand. to increase defense spending Up to 5% of GDP. In capitals including Berlin and Paris, officials said Sanchez was jeopardizing Europe’s painstaking efforts to avoid a confrontation with Trump that could provoke him to start a trade war, abandon Ukraine or blow up NATO.

Other European leaders excluded him from the group chat, where they discussed how to handle Trump amid a series of tensions in trans-Atlantic relations from Ukraine to Greenland.

Spanish officials have rejected Trump’s threat to punish the country, confident he cannot impose sanctions on just one member of the EU, which trades as a bloc. The sentiment among La Moncloa’s mostly millennial-aged staff is that Trump doesn’t hold as many cards as he thinks.

Sanchez points out that the US exports more to Spain than it imports.

“We have temporary disagreements, but I think the relationship between the United States and Spain is closer than ever,” Sanchez told the Journal. “Americans love Spain.”

In fact, under his watch the growing population of American residents in Spain has nearly doubled. About 80,000 natural-born Americans live in Spain, a number that does not fully count students, dual citizens, workers on short-term contracts or residents who believe they will return to the US in the near future.

When the two heads of government met at a summit in Egypt last October, Trump was cool, playfully teasing the elder Spanish leader over which of them would prevail on defense spending.

The impressive simplicity of Sánchez’s political message has led some observers to describe him as a figure cut from the same cloth: a European socialist version of Trump.

Such messaging led to a dispute with Musk last month, when the world’s richest man opposed Spain’s pledge to ban children under 16 from social-media sites like X.

“Social media has become a failed state, a place where laws are ignored and crime tolerated, where misinformation is more valuable than the truth,” Sanchez said at a conference in Dubai in February.

“Dirty Sanchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain,” Musk responded on Twitter, adding a poop emoji, in reference to an obscene sexual act. Later, the European branch of X asked to meet and smooth things over, but Sanchez’s office rejected them.

Sanchez told the Journal that his goal is to “make democracy great again. And that means somehow we need to regulate these digital platforms around the world and guarantee some accountability.” He argues that online abuse of children is not an issue of freedom of speech.

According to attendees, the California governor said, “My wife told me I should talk to you about this.” “She thinks this is what our society needs.” Both agreed that Europe should show more firmness in dealing with Trump.

Sanchez is pushing to build a network of left-wing politicians around the world — mirroring the cross-border clubs that right-wing nationalists have created from Hungary to Argentina with White House support. His office is trying to bring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., NY) to a summit of international progressives in Barcelona next month.

Opinion polls show Spain’s far-right Vox party is likely to enter government as a junior partner to Spanish conservatives after elections next year – a first for Spain since fascism.

Critics say Sanchez’s lean to the left on many policies – including on immigration, where he is proposing legal residency for hundreds of thousands of irregular immigrants – has helped the far right grow. Sanchez’s advisers say it is better to pursue explicitly leftist policies than to govern with no clear program, which they say has pushed more voters to the populist fringes in other parts of Europe.

Some of his colleagues see Sánchez as a populist whose stance is motivated by the weakness of his position in Spanish domestic politics. He has led Spain since 2018 despite a tenuous hold on parliament, surviving thanks to deals with smaller leftist and regional parties.

Lacking enough votes to pass a budget through 2023, his popularity has been hit by corruption investigations against family members and Socialist Party officials, all of whom deny wrongdoing.

On Iran, “I think their motivation is entirely about throwing red meat to their leftist coalition members and putting the right-wing opposition on the wrong side of the issue,” said Fabrice Pothier, chief executive of geopolitical consulting firm Rasmussen Global and a former NATO official.

Sanchez’s allies reject accusations that he is motivated by domestic politics, or that he is using Trump’s widespread unpopularity in Europe to divert attention from domestic troubles. Aides said he never even conducted an opinion poll to find out whether Spaniards would support another US-led intervention in the Middle East.

Sanchez agreed. A few hours later, White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt announced that Spain “has agreed to cooperate with U.S. forces.” Sanchez’s office responded with one word: “False.”

Spain has long been one of Europe’s more ambitious countries when it comes to American power. Unlike countries occupied by Nazi or Soviet forces, Spain’s independence and democracy have had little influence on the United States. The US cooperated with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who offered military bases during the Cold War.

Spain’s distance of 1,500 miles from the Russian border means that some Spaniards feel the same sense of danger as in their countries to the east. Sanchez angered European allies last year by saying Russian troops were unlikely to reach the Pyrenees.

“I agree that this war in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine, but also about how (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is trying to undermine the European project,” he told the Journal. He was hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the next day to discuss Spanish production of drones and air-defense lasers.

He continues to reject NATO’s 5% of GDP target for defense spending.