Pedro Sánchez does not consider that the legislature is over, but neither does he deceive the loner about the parliamentary weakness of the government. The president asked the ministers of the PSOE and the Sumar coalition to each present him with a list of three or four social measures that the Executive could approve in 2026 without going through Congress, as EL PAÍS was able to confirm with a dozen government sources. In other words, without La Moncloa’s legislative action depending on the volatility of a broken investiture bloc, where Podemos has been against it for a long time and Junts insists that he already considered broken in the fall the pact that made Sánchez president, even if all this resentment does not translate into the fall of the government.
The president made this mission in November and, in the following weeks, he insisted on his demand for “ambitious” and “disruptive” proposals, according to ministers, secretaries of state and other senior officials at La Moncloa. The request “was not a brainstorm”, details a government heavyweight, but a list of “concrete and marketable ideas”, “easy” to put into practice and “to connect with people”, which, despite good macroeconomic data, suffer from the increase in the cost of living, with the price of housing becoming one of the main social problems.
Sánchez’s goal is to try to regain the initiative after a disastrous end to the year due to corruption and sexual harassment scandals, and the socialist disaster in Extremadura. The formula for setting the public agenda would go through a series of impact measures whose validation does not depend on the Cortes and which citizens can attribute without doubt to the Government and not to other Administrations such as the autonomous communities, governed mainly by the PP. At the same time, there would be measures that must be approved by Congress, such as the revaluation of pensions and other proposals that are part of the last social shield, or the increase in civil servants’ salaries. Support for these initiatives is uncertain, but the government is playing with the difficulties of the Junts to justify its rejection or those of the PP itself, which voted a year ago against the increase in pensions in a country with 9.4 million retirees. However, the executive is aware that the margin of confidence is increasingly narrow: in September it suffered a very severe setback when PP, Vox and Junts canceled the reduction in working hours.
The government’s prospects in Congress are not at all promising and, in fact, the draft budget will be presented without any guarantee of success in the first quarter of 2026. It is for this reason that Sánchez jealously guards the announcements he has in mind, according to the sources consulted. The measures should not result in significant public expenditure, we concede to La Moncloa. However, no one knows that improving the minimum wage will be one of the key measures of the plan designed by the government. The minimum wage was increased by 61% during Sánchez’s mandate, from 736 euros in 2018 to 1,184 euros gross per month in 2025, divided into 14 payments.
The experts required by the Ministry of Labor, led by Second Vice President Yolanda Díaz, propose that it be 1,221 euros gross per month in 14 installments in 2026 if it is tax-exempt or 1,240 if it contributes to personal income tax. The coalition has already demonstrated its ability to transform a positive measure into a bitter confrontation between the PSOE and Sumar over the taxation of the minimum wage and that is why it is seeking a consensual formula that satisfies both partners. The Treasury is considering a deduction of around 600 euros so that beneficiaries of the future SMIC do not pay personal income tax.
Another example of how things are changing, highlighted in one of the ministries responsible for social policies, is the public aid program of up to 100 euros that entered into force this month to finance glasses or contact lenses for minors up to 16 years old, promoted by the Ministry of Health. In La Moncloa they differentiate ministries with more social content, such as those of Transport or Housing, but they also highlight the muscle that Defense has acquired after Sánchez’s commitment to invest an additional 10,471 million euros to meet the 2% of GDP in military spending this year. “Concretely, this means 220,000 jobs in an industrial corridor across Spain,” underlines a Secretary of State, who emphasizes that it is a policy that allows establishing a population with qualified jobs in provinces like Soria, Jaén and Teruel.
La Moncloa also does not give any clues about the deadlines it manages. Discretion is total, with watertight departments, as several ministers recognize. “I don’t know the proposals from the rest of the ministries,” said one of them. What is certain is that Sánchez will present them and that part of them will coincide with the start of the year conditioned by the next election, on February 8 in Aragon, and a month later by the elections in Castilla y León. Elections in Andalusia will take place in June at the latest. “Looking at the calendar, it is logical that the president wants to have a drawer of initiatives on which to rely to stand out and differentiate himself (from the right). It is true that noise kills content, but when you have something interesting, noise also resolves noise. And in the end, the BOE is the BOE,” observes another minister.
One of the readings left by the PSOE’s debacle in the Extremadura elections, in which it collapsed from 28 to 18 seats compared to the 2023 regional elections and lost more than 100,000 votes (from 242,659 to 136,017) and 14.2 points of support (from 39.9% to 25.7%), is that the major part of this gap of voters opted for abstention rather than for the right. “They stayed at home mainly because of dissatisfaction with the candidate – Miguel Ángel Gallardo, who resigned as secretary general on Tuesday – and therefore they are recoverable, but we must give them hope, give them a future. The management since 2018 is not enough, we must continue to transform Spain”, they say in the president’s entourage, where they affirm that the measures that Sánchez will study these days must be clearly identified with the government “as opposed to the leadership of the PP and Vox”.
One of the president’s reflections during the PSOE leadership meeting on Monday of last week was that citizens do not perceive the “involution” in public policies that he attributes to the right and far-right pacts “thanks to the fact that the PSOE governs Spain” and “puts a brake on them”. It is in this sense that Elma Saiz spoke on Tuesday, during her debut as new spokesperson for the Executive, in place of Pilar Alegría, following the early elections in Aragon. “The citizens of the autonomous communities where the PP and Vox pacts are developing still do not suffer and do not see the consequences of the involution of the budget cuts that they propose, letting public services or freedoms such as the right to abortion die because the Spanish government guarantees the protection of these rights and public services,” he observed. During this appearance, Óscar Puente highlighted that the Ministry of Transport had submitted to the Council of Ministers only in December “questions for approval amounting to 3,008 million euros”. “Without budgets or with expanded budgets,” he stressed, insisting that the government adopt “important measures for people’s lives” every week without depending on Congress.
A minister interprets that there is another underlying message in the tasks that Sánchez imposed on the 22 ministries: his desire to continue governing in the face of the idea conveyed by the PP of a government in full agony. “The president has the will to govern and continue to do so and this is a way of transmitting it to all of us. He wants innovative ideas, but also for the staff to clearly know that they are connected and that they demand the same thing from us,” he underlines. “And let us all believe that there will be no general elections before 2027,” he concludes.
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