Lately, I haven’t been able to get the words of William F. Buckley Jr. out of my head: “The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.” Last Monday, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that the country’s general election would be brought forward to November 29. As a sociologist, I usually place limited value on casual observation, but I confess I haven’t seen such joy on the streets as I have this week in a long time. Sánchez has done something worse than govern poorly: He has managed to exasperate the Spanish people.
There is a common joke in Spain: If your mobile phone gets stolen in Madrid or Barcelona, you’re best off looking for it that same afternoon in a souk in Rabat. While he wasn’t physically pickpocketed, Pedro Sánchez himself had his phone infected with Pegasus spyware in 2021, likely an attack from Moroccan intelligence services. No one knows what is in those two-and-a-half gigabytes of data (it is unlikely to be treatises on apologetics), but all of Spain is convinced that ever since then, most of the strange decisions he has made have been conditioned by that espionage, including his historic shift in position on Western Sahara in Morocco’s favor and his silence toward Rabat following the migrant invasion of Ceuta this summer. Someday we will know if the mobile phone holds the key to this early election call.
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