Spain PM Pedro Sánchez revives the disastrous legacy of Angela Merkel

When Pedro Sánchez announced on Jan. 27 that his government would offer renewable residence and work permits to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, the move was framed—at least internationally—as a moral and economic flex: Spain as the humane counter-model to the spectacle of U.S. immigration roundups under President Trump, then under renewed scrutiny after the fatal shooting of activist Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.

But Spain’s “amnesty-by-decree” is not the triumphal alternative its admirers imagine. It is, instead, a familiar European pattern: high-minded rhetoric masking a low-wage economic strategy, wrapped in the personal-brand politics of leaders who increasingly govern with one eye on the next job.

Europe has watched this movie before. Angela Merkel’s 2015 migration gamble was celebrated across elite circles as a humanitarian watershed—until the political bill came due: polarization, durable public distrust, and the normalization of insurgent right-wing politics. Spain now risks replaying the script, with Sánchez as the author of a sequel—and with today’s Europe far less forgiving than the Europe of 2015.

Spain is already one of the EU’s biggest immigration magnets

To understand what Sánchez is doing, ignore the slogans and look at the volumes.

Eurostat’s latest country totals show that in 2023 the EU’s biggest recipients of immigrants (in absolute numbers) were: Germany (1,271,200), Spain (1,251,000), Italy (439,700), and France (417,600).

That headline alone is startling: Spain sits essentially level with Germany, Europe’s demographic heavyweight.

But it becomes more revealing once you scale by population. On 1 January 2024, Eurostat’s demography publication puts Germany at 83.4 million and Spain at 48.6 million residents.
Using those two Eurostat figures together implies Spain absorbed roughly ~25.7 immigrants per 1,000 residents in 2023, versus ~15.2 per 1,000 for Germany—meaning Spain’s inflow, relative to its size, is in a different league from the other major EU states.

This is not a marginal adjustment to Spain’s demographic trajectory. It is the trajectory.

A recent analysis from the Elcano Royal Institute argues Spain is reaching 50 million residents in 2026, with net migration doing the heavy lifting against low fertility and natural decrease, and notes that foreign-born residents are approaching ~10 million. So the claim that Sánchez is merely “responding to demography” is at best incomplete. Spain is not cautiously using migration to stabilize an aging society; it is already undergoing one of Western Europe’s sharpest population transformations—and Sánchez is accelerating the pace.

What Sánchez actually announced: regularization by decree, at huge scale

The policy design matters because it signals intent.

Spain’s government approved a royal decree to regularize about 500,000 undocumented migrants and certain asylum applicants, granting an initial one-year residence authorization plus a work permit, renewable under conditions set out by the government. Eligibility includes proving at least five months’ residence before Dec. 31, 2025, and having no criminal record; people who applied for international protection before the end of 2025 are also included.

Two features should set off alarms for anyone pretending this is just technocratic housekeeping:

1. It is being done by decree, bypassing a full parliamentary process—classic behavior when a government wants the benefit of action without the friction of persuasion.
2. It is scheduled to take effect in April 2026, which means Spain is deliberately broadcasting “exceptional openness” into a European environment that has moved in the opposite direction since 2015.

And the true scale may be larger than the government’s headline. One recent summary of Spain’s move notes Funcas estimated roughly 840,000 undocumented people in Spain at the start of 2025.

Whether the regularization covers 500,000 or pushes toward the upper boundary of the irregular population, the political signal is the same: Spain is advertising itself as the outlier.

Sánchez’s model is not a “miracle”—it’s a low-productivity trap

The moral case for humane treatment of migrants is one thing. The economic story Sánchez sells is another.

Spain’s growth can look impressive in top-line numbers. But this is also an economy still structurally dependent on sectors that scale by adding labor at the bottom of the wage ladder—tourism, hospitality, seasonal agriculture, low-end services. A policy that injects large numbers of newly regularized workers into this machine does not modernize Spain; it locks in the very model that keeps productivity weak and wages squeezed.

And here is the core contradiction Sánchez cannot wish away:

• Spain is justifying mass regularization partly as a response to labor needs, while
• the country still operates with around double-digit unemployment (recent reporting puts it near or just below 10%), and very high youth unemployment.

In that environment, the political psychology is predictable. When leaders say “we need more workers” while large numbers of citizens cannot find stable work, people do not interpret it as macroeconomic sophistication; they interpret it as contempt—or worse, as an elite project that treats ordinary life as collateral damage.

That is how you get the second-order effects that can, in a very real sense, “destroy” a country’s social contract:

• housing pressure that becomes generational resentment,
• public services strained in the places least able to absorb it,
• a permanent low-wage underclass that becomes politically radioactive, and
• an electorate that stops trusting mainstream parties to draw boundaries.

Sánchez is not dissolving Spain with one decree. But he is pouring fuel on precisely the set of structural and political tensions that hollow out a democracy from the inside.

The backlash is already visible: Vox is not a theoretical risk

Europe learned the hard way that immigration politics does not remain politely “managed” at the margins. It metastasizes into a governing cleavage.

Spain is already seeing an early version of that dynamic. After Sánchez’s regularization announcement, his party faced an electoral test in Aragón: the Socialists lost seats while Vox doubled its representation there, according to Reuters reporting.

This matters because it mirrors the post-2015 trajectory in Germany: migration becomes a credibility test, mainstream parties wobble, and the outsider party gets normalized as the “only one saying what everyone sees.”

That was the hidden legacy of Merkel’s 2015 choice—not simply “more diversity,” but a political environment where large blocs of voters concluded that their leaders would not defend borders, rules, or cultural continuity unless forced. Scholarly and policy analyses have repeatedly linked the refugee inflow and local exposure to refugees with shifts toward right-wing voting in Germany.

Spain is not Germany. But human political incentives are remarkably consistent across borders.

Switzerland shows where Europe’s public mood has moved

Now add the comparison Sánchez’s defenders rarely want to confront: Switzerland.

On June 14, Swiss voters will decide whether to cap the country’s permanent resident population at 10 million by 2050 under the Swiss People’s Party initiative “No to ten million Switzerland.”

Under the initiative, Swiss authorities would be required to act once the population exceeds 9.5 million—and the measures contemplated go directly to the heart of immigration politics: asylum rules, family reunification, and even renegotiation (or termination) of international agreements deemed to fuel demographic growth.

The Swiss federal government recommends rejecting the initiative and warns it threatens prosperity and Switzerland’s bilateral path with the EU; it also notes that if the cap isn’t restored within two years after being exceeded, the initiative would force termination of the EU free-movement agreement—triggering broader legal consequences through the so-called “guillotine clause,” and potentially endangering Schengen/Dublin participation.

Here’s the key point for Spain:

Switzerland is not an impoverished state panicking about outsiders. It is a wealthy, highly functional, heavily internationalized country—and even there, democratic pressure is building for hard numerical limits.

Swiss federal statistics show that 41% of the permanent resident population aged 15+ had a migration background in 2024.
This is a society that has absorbed immigration for decades, and yet the political system is now being pulled toward caps because voters experience immigration as infrastructure strain, rent pressure, and identity dilution.

And the polling suggests the cap initiative is not fringe: one widely cited survey for Tamedia/20 Minuten, conducted by Leewas, found 48% planning to vote yes, 41% no, with the remainder undecided.

Switzerland’s own history underscores that these sentiments can translate into real constitutional outcomes: in 2009, Swiss voters approved a constitutional ban on constructing new minarets.

So what does it say about Sánchez’s strategy when even Switzerland—often held up as the archetype of orderly governance—is debating population ceilings, while Spain is announcing mass regularization by decree?

It says Sánchez is governing against the European weather.

Europe is tightening—so Spain’s “exception” becomes a magnet

Sánchez’s defenders lean on a technicality: “It only applies to people already in Spain.”

That’s naïve. In migration politics, signals are policy.

If Spain projects that it will repeatedly convert irregular status into legal status at scale, it increases the expected payoff of entering (or overstaying) in the first place. And because Spain is in Schengen, it is not only Spain’s issue; it becomes an EU friction point—exactly why the European Parliament has scheduled debate over Spain’s regularization and its implications.

At the same time, the EU’s overall trend has been toward tougher controls and returns, driven partly by electoral pressure and the normalization of hardline platforms across member states.

This is the strategic mismatch: while others raise fences, Sánchez hangs a neon sign that reads “exceptions here.”

The personal-ambition layer: this is how the modern political CV gets built

Now we get to the uncomfortable motive question—uncomfortable because it’s often true.

You cannot prove what is inside a politician’s head. But you can observe what politicians incentivize, what they signal, and what career ladders reward.

Sánchez has cultivated an international profile for years. The Jan. 27 decree is perfectly designed for global applause: a dramatic humanitarian gesture, timed when U.S. enforcement tactics were under intense condemnation after the Pretti shooting.
Domestically, he bypasses parliament; internationally, he earns headlines.

This is not new. Merkel’s 2015 posture also functioned as moral leadership for a global audience. And long before her chancellorship ended, European media speculated about her interest in top international roles, including at the UN.
Later, Reuters reported Merkel turned down an offer for a UN role—evidence that such offers were, in fact, on the table.

The important takeaway is not that “Merkel did it for a UN job” (motives are rarely that clean), but that the ecosystem links moral grandstanding to international employability.

The De Croo example is the pattern in miniature

Look at Belgium’s former prime minister Alexander De Croo. After leaving office, he was appointed—by the UN Secretary-General and confirmed by the General Assembly—as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), taking up a four-year term to run the UN’s lead development agency.

This is not “UN refugees” (UNHCR is a separate organization). But it is, arguably, an even more prestigious platform: UNDP sits at the center of the UN system’s development footprint across ~170 countries.

And De Croo’s record in office was consistently pitched in the language that travels well in UN corridors: international cooperation, humanitarian framing, and values signaling. For instance, he publicly criticized Israel’s Gaza campaign as “disproportionate” early in the conflict—again, a position that plays strongly with global NGO and multilateral audiences.

Did he take those stances to get the UNDP job? Nobody can prove a direct quid pro quo. But his trajectory demonstrates the incentive structure Sánchez is almost certainly reading: if you want a post-national role later, build a post-national brand now.

And mass regularization—especially when done theatrically against a tightening Europe—creates exactly that kind of brand.

Spain can still choose Switzerland’s realism over Sánchez’s vanity

Switzerland is not perfect, and capping population by constitutional referendum carries real economic risks—Swiss officials have been explicit about that.
But Switzerland’s current debate has one virtue Spain’s leadership increasingly lacks: it takes the limits question seriously—limits of housing, infrastructure, cohesion, and democratic consent.

Spain does not need to copy Switzerland’s mechanism to learn its lesson.

It needs to recover three ideas Sánchez’s decree undermines:

1. Legitimacy requires consent—not rule by decree on issues that reshape the nation.
2. Migration policy must be tied to a productivity strategy—skills, integration capacity, housing supply, and enforcement credibility.
3. A country is not a stage for a leader’s international audition.

If Sánchez continues down this path, Spain risks the Merkel outcome without Merkel’s institutional discipline: a decade of polarization, a permanent insurgent right, and a political center that survives only by becoming what it once denounced.

That is how countries don’t just “change.” They fracture.