THE GUARDIAN: Outrage at the US, close ties with Venezuela and mounting domestic challenges have prompted Pedro Sánchez to take a stand
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, rarely utters the words “Donald Trump” in public. Since the US president took office, Sánchez has typically referred to the US administration and its president without explicitly naming him. This was initially interpreted as a calculation designed to avoid personal confrontation, but even without using Trump’s name, Sánchez has managed to deliver harsher criticism of the US president’s aggression than any of his fellow European leaders.
This week, Sánchez did not wait for a joint EU statement to issue judgment on the US’s illegal military intervention to capture the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro: he swiftly joined Latin American countries in condemning it. A few hours later he went even further, saying the operation in Caracas represented “a terrible precedent and a very dangerous one [which] reminds us of past aggressions, and pushes the world toward a future of uncertainty and insecurity, similar to what we already experienced after other invasions driven by the thirst for oil”.
Sanchez was speaking in Paris on Tuesday after a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine. Indeed, he made the case that on Venezuela, Ukraine and Gaza he was applying the same reasoning in defence of an international order “based on the observance of fair rules, not on the law of the jungle”.
He also pushed back against US sabre-rattling over Greenland: “Spain, believing in peace, diplomacy and the United Nations, cannot, of course, accept this, just as we cannot accept the explicit threat to the territorial integrity of a European state, as is the case with Denmark.” » | María Ramírez | Friday, January 9, 2026
Kudos to Pedro Sanchez for having the courage to stand up to the arrogant orange bully. — © Mark Alexander
