The question of whether there will be a better moment is one that has repeatedly arisen throughout Pedro Sánchez’s political career. On more than one occasion, the uncertainty has hovered more around when it is worth doing something than about what exactly should be done. A president may know how majorities work and be aware of the timing of polls, but there are always doubts about whether the conditions before him are the best that can be expected. In this dilemma, acting means giving up the possibility that time will improve one’s position, and waiting implies accepting the opposite risk: that conditions worsen and that an opportunity may disappear. Deciding between these two risks is another facet of the political game.
“Acting means giving up the possibility that time will improve one’s position, and waiting implies accepting that conditions may worsen and that an opportunity may disappear”
Sánchez has achieved some of his greatest political successes because he rarely has considered a disadvantageous situation or one that seemed impossible to be closed. It happened with his return to the general secretaryship of the PSOE in 2017, with the 2018 motion of no confidence, with the formation of the coalition government after the repeat election of 2019, and with the investiture after 23-J. They are very different episodes, but in all of them there was a period between the initial moment and the outcome. During that interval the available alternatives changed and, with them, the incentives of the actors.
That way of doing politics weighs more in post-bipartisan Spain. Among his predecessors, Felipe González could govern for years with absolute majorities, and José María Aznar first had a relatively stable parliamentary majority and then an absolute one. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero also operated within a system organized fundamentally around two large parties. Sánchez arrived in a scenario different from Rajoy’s prior experience: Podemos first and Sumar later to his left, Vox to the right of the PP, and nationalist and pro-independence parties turned into necessary pieces to build state majorities. Governing under those conditions has forced a rethinking in a few years of the logics of the system born in 1978.
The decree or the Maricarmen decrees are the most recent example of this new logic. Despite the eruption of social demand, they have not been approved, and the parliamentary result is unequivocal: the Government has lost. After this, in Moncloa they only ask themselves what can be done politically with that defeat?
“Pese al estallido de la demanda social, los decretos no han sido aprobados y el resultado parlamentario es inequívoco: el Gobierno ha perdido”
Housing gives the PSOE the ability to compete in a terrain very sensitive for the parties to its left. At the same time, it shifts the public debate toward a social issue, which until now had been completely framed by the Ceuta crisis. To its right, the move forces the PP and Junts to explain their position on a problem that crosses electoral boundaries. Also, its voters pay high rents, have children who struggle to emancipate themselves, or see how obtaining housing becomes an obstacle to starting a family. Junts had, moreover, presented its own housing proposals.
The outcome of the Congress is close, although its political meaning remains open. One perfectly valid interpretation places the focus on a government unable to muster the votes needed for a major initiative and again displays the fragility of its majority. But at this moment the discussion may also turn around the reasons why the PP and Junts rejected certain housing measures. Not every defeat can be transformed into an opportunity, just as not every parliamentary defeat automatically provokes an equivalent deterioration of the one who suffers it. The Government has lost the votes. Now the question is what narrative gives meaning to having lost them.
Returning to the question: will there be a better moment? After a defeat, Sánchez can try to immediately rebuild his majority or accept that the margin of maneuver has narrowed. He can also wait to see what effect the defeat itself has on the other actors. The negative vote of Junts can be perfectly tolerable today and prove harder to sustain if pressure from its voters on housing increases. Or it can happen the exact opposite and confirm that the parliamentary majority has deteriorated. The president does not know in advance which process will prevail, so he must decide how much time is worth granting a situation before concluding that it will not improve.
A party that expects to improve in an election negotiates from a position different from another that fears losing representation. The seats remain the same, but the alternatives modify the political balance of forces. In the 2018 motion of censure, Sánchez had 84 deputies and no election altered the composition of the Congress before his arrival at the Moncloa. After the Gürtel verdict, the context in which other parties had to decide what to do with the votes they already possessed.
“The seats remain the same, but the alternatives modify the political balance of forces”
Momentum appears when an action taken within a political opening alters the expectations of others and those expectations, in turn, begin to change their behavior. They do not replace reality, but they are part of it because the actors make decisions thinking also about what they believe will happen next. A government perceived as terminal may start to lose support as its partners anticipate its end; another that seemed doomed may regain bargaining power if its rivals begin to fear the alternatives. Power depends on the resources available, but also on how each actor expects to use them and on what others believe he will do with them.
After 23-J, the PP had won the elections and the PSOE had come in second, but the ballots had not automatically decided who would be president. They had distributed the resources with which a second game began: the construction of a parliamentary majority. Feijóo had to convert his electoral victory into an investiture; Sánchez, to determine whether he could form an alternative combination despite finishing second. The arithmetic was known from election night. The political translation remained open. Turning that objective difficulty into an inevitable outcome would require closing a game that was still ongoing too soon.
Asking whether there will be a better moment explains thus a part of Sánchez’s politics that the categories of tactic and strategy capture only partially. He does not need to know exactly what will happen in six months, but to preserve enough freedom of movement to act when the situation begins to take a recognizable form. Waiting can be a strategic decision if it gives time for others’ incentives to change; keeping several possibilities open can increase bargaining power; even ambiguity can be useful for a time. The strategy here resembles navigating: there is a general orientation, but the path must adapt to conditions that could not be known at the start of the journey.
That logic also carries a risk for Sánchez. Having repeatedly shown that apparently terminal situations could be reversed may lead him to draw the wrong lesson from his own successes. Having returned after 2016 does not mean that any defeat can be reversed; having built an improbable majority in 2018 does not prove that any majority is buildable; having turned the second place in 2023 into an investiture does not guarantee that any future result could lead to the same outcome. Victories provide experience, but they also generate analogies. And analogies become a trap when they lead to interpreting the present through episodes that only superficially resemble it.
“Analogies become a trap when they lead to interpreting the present through episodes that only superficially resemble it”
Momentum politics thus has its own pathology: to believe that there will always be another move. One of Sánchez’s strengths has been not to confuse a unfavorable situation with one that is definitively closed. The risk is to take too long to recognize when a situation has indeed begun to close. “We have been here before” can be a good reminder against panic and a terrible diagnostic tool. The confidence gained after surviving several crises can end up turning into the conviction that time will always offer an additional opportunity.
The question in the title encloses two possible errors. Hastening could lead to discovering later that waiting would have improved the position; waiting too long could show that the best moment had already passed. Between them lies political judgement: the ability to distinguish which elements of a situation can still be modified and which begin to acquire an irreversible character. The Greeks used kairos to refer to the right moment to act; Machiavelli added that the politician does not simply wait for the proper circumstances, but tries to transform them through his own action.
“Between both lies political judgement: the ability to distinguish which elements of a situation can still be modified and which begin to take on an irreversible character”
The call for elections takes that decision to the limit. Every call implicitly contains a comparison between a known present and an uncertain future. To call implies accepting the current conditions; to wait, to bet that the future will be better or, at least, not significantly worse. Sánchez has acted for much of his career as if there was still something to decide between the present snapshot and the next. Sometimes that intuition allowed him to find possibilities that others had discarded too soon. No prior experience can tell when that logic stops working.
This may now be his most important question. Waiting can broaden the possibilities or exhaust them. Time can weaken an adversary or strengthen him, improve a majority or make it impossible, permit a crisis to disappear or turn it into something structural. Political judgement consists of distinguishing some situations from others. And there is a difficulty no politician, no matter how seasoned, can eliminate: one only discovers with certainty that there will not be a better moment when that moment has already passed.
