Sánchez responded to Trump’s pro-fossil fuel “Drill, baby, drill” slogan with one of his own: “Green, baby, green,” echoing his government’s commitment to renewable energy. Madrid has set a target of deriving 81 percent of its electricity output from renewables by 2030, well above the EU average.
His administration has also stridently defended immigration on economic and humanitarian grounds — and is currently in the process of legalizing the status of at least half a million unauthorized foreign workers.
“Unless they embrace migration, [Western countries] will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat,” Sánchez wrote in the New York Times in February. He used the op-ed to launch a thinly veiled attack on Trump’s migrant crackdown, warning of the “illegal and cruel” policies in place in some countries.
The clash between Sánchez’s self-declared “leftist, feminist, green” coalition and Trump’s MAGA government has been fed by simmering anti-Americanism in Spain.
Lluís Orriols, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, explained that some anti-American sentiment has always been present on the Spanish left, but Socialist governments rarely tap into it. One exception was in 2004, when the newly elected prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq.
“The Socialists only sometimes make use of this [anti-Americanism],” Orriols said. “And when they do, it tends to have electoral benefits.”