Spain's opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo used a visit to Lima for the presidential inauguration of Keiko Fujimori to deliver a wide-ranging attack on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, describing his government as paralysed by judicial cases and no longer capable of governing.
Feijóo, president of the Partido Popular (PP) since April 2022, said his relationship with Fujimori was built on shared projects, ideals, and political beliefs. She had attended a European People's Party summit in Valencia in April 2025, and before Peru's election he had asked the Peruvian community in Madrid to vote for her. He said he was glad for her and for Peru and hoped Peruvians would feel at the end of her term that it had been worthwhile.
Institutional collapse
Turning to conditions in Spain, Feijóo said the country was living through a period of enormous institutional tension. The Sánchez government had gone three full years of the current parliamentary term without passing a national budget, something he said had never happened before in Spain. The administration also faces 19 corruption cases in Spanish courts, from the Supreme Court and the Audiencia Nacional to regional tribunals.
The judicial problems touching those close to Sánchez were, he argued, without precedent. The former number two of the government, José Luis Ábalos, is in prison with a 24-year sentence. His successor at the ministry faces a pending final trial. Sánchez's brother has received a nine-year conviction for malfeasance, and a jury trial has just been authorised against the prime minister's wife on several charges. There are also cases involving alleged illegal financing of Sánchez's Socialist party, the PSOE, and the alleged illegal awarding of public works contracts involving kickbacks. Former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, he added, is under investigation for allegedly receiving commissions from Venezuelan companies and for possession of jewels in his office.
Feijóo said the government did not function, was blocked, and its only agenda was a judicial one. The concerns of the prime minister and his ministers, he said, revolved around how they would appear in court case files, police reports, and the testimony of those summoned before judges, leaving no time for the political agenda that affected people's lives.
At the end of June, an absolute majority of Spain's Congress of Deputies voted in a resolution calling for Sánchez's resignation, a step he said had no precedent. He described Spain as being in a state of institutional and parliamentary collapse, without a functioning government, approved accounts, a budget, or legislation.
Reform proposals and the path to elections
Feijóo acknowledged the PP had also faced corruption cases, but said these had involved individuals who acted improperly after leaving government, in their subsequent private or professional lives. He insisted the current situation had no comparison or historical precedent.
On legal reform, he said Spain's pardon law, which he described as very old, needed to be changed. His proposals included banning pardons for politicians convicted of corruption, requiring a minimum of five years out of any political office before a politician could take a post at a state institution, and blocking direct transfers from government into the Constitutional Court, the Council of State, or the Bank of Spain.
General elections are expected in the middle of 2027, he said, but the government's dysfunction made it impossible to predict whether they might come sooner. What was certain, he said, was that there would be more court testimonies in the meantime.
Sánchez recently said that three groups he labelled as ultrarights, naming the PP, the Vox party, and politician Alvise Perez, would contest the 2027 elections and that he would defeat all three. Feijóo rejected the characterisation, calling Sánchez the most radical politician in Spain at present, and describing his own party as centre-right, the second-largest delegation in the European People's Party after the Germans.
Immigration, Trump and Venezuela
On immigration, Feijóo described the government's approach as the clearest example of what he called Sánchez's lack of professionalism, prudence, and rigour. He said 20 percent of Spain's population is now of foreign origin. The government is regularising all who entered the country irregularly up to December 30, 2025, and is granting passports to those with Spanish ancestry as remote as great-great-grandchildren, amounting to the regularisation of 4 million people. He said this contradicted European Union immigration and asylum regulations already in force.
On transatlantic relations, Feijóo drew a distinction between the United States and President Donald Trump, and between what Trump says and what he actually does. He said Trump's statements could surprise because they broke with diplomatic convention, but the response should be to express agreement when there was agreement and respectful disagreement when there was not, while keeping the relationship intact. He dismissed suggestions that Sánchez was one of the few European leaders to stand up to Trump, saying Sánchez used the apparent confrontation to consolidate his domestic position and that Trump's primary concern was not Sánchez.
On Venezuela, he said María Corina Machado and Edmundo González had won the elections and were the leaders chosen by the Venezuelan people. He said he had spoken with Marco Rubio on the subject and had the impression that the Americans were looking for the right moment to hold democratic elections in Venezuela. He called on Washington to ensure Machado could return to her country and for new elections to be convened.
