🇪🇸🗳️ Today I will cover the second half of the series of posts about the Spanish candidates in the upcoming elections in the country. Yesterday I focused on who Pedro Sánchez, the current president (or prime minister) of Spain; Today I will focus on his program.
PSOE (the Social Democrats, part of the Socialist International, led by Pedro Sánchez) consistently averages 26% in the polls, behind the PP. They are maintaining better numbers thanks to expectations, given the many media corruption cases linked to the party, poor handling of disasters such as the summer fires and deadly train accidents, showing that they have a strong base.
In the economy, PSOE proposes to reduce the average working day to 36 hours a week in 2030 and guarantee in the constitution a minimum wage of at least 60% of the average wage; They also proposed legally obliging large companies to distribute profits among their employees and an income tax rate of 50% on revenues exceeding €300,000 per year.
In the area of taxes, the legislator left a fixed tax on banking and a minimum tax rate of 15% for large multinational corporations. The PSOE government goes to the polls without approving new budgets since 2023.
The socialists are adding their new funding model to the autonomous communities, with almost 21,000 million more to the communities in 2027, which will go to health, education and housing.
Regarding education, PSOE guarantees a maximum of 22 students per class in primary school and 25 in secondary education (currently 25 and 30) in publicly funded schools, and a maximum of 23 teaching hours per week for primary and elementary school teachers and 18 in the other levels of education.
They offer free university tuition and higher professional education for those who have passed the first year (every approved credit will be free for the next year), free public education for 0 to 3 years gradually, a training guarantee for ages 16 to 18 to reduce school dropouts, additional scholarships and no textbooks in partnership with regional governments.
Regarding housing and accessibility, one of the main issues for the voters, Sánchez promises to suspend the eviction of vulnerable families without alternative housing until 2030, opens an exceptional two-year extension for expired contracts, limits the rent increase to 2% in existing contracts until the end of 2027, and sets a 10% VAT for tourist apartments. It adds a 25% surcharge on benefits not distributed from public housing schemes, provides income tax relief for tenants with income below €33,000 and landlords who reduce the rent, and offers ICO interest-free loans of up to 20% of the price (maximum €50,000) for the first home, and tenants who do not renew the lease without a valid reason will have to compensate the tenants in 12 monthly rental payments.
PSOE defends a target of 81% of electricity for renewable energies by 2030 and a 32% reduction in emissions, taking 1990 as a starting point. Pedro Sánchez insists on a national agreement in the face of the "climate emergency".
They are committed to their current plan to close the remaining Spanish nuclear power plants.
The party also defends the amnesty law, approved by the Constitutional Court in 2025, as a tool for normalization in Catalonia, which grants amnesty to the main figures who took part in the separatist coup in 2017, acquitting them of embezzlement charges and allowing the Catalan nationalist leader, Carles Puigdemont, to return from hiding in Brussels.
Sánchez promises to combine border control with normal immigration routes and integration, and to protect immigration as a driver for employment and pensions. His main step is the extraordinary series, agreed with Podemos in January 2026 and approved by royal decree in April: it granted a residence and work permit for one year to those who had been in Spain for at least five months before December 31, 2025, and had no criminal record. The deadline ended on June 30 with 1,174,978 applications.