PEDRO SÁNCHEZ is no stranger to comebacks: ejected as leader of his Socialist party in 2016, he toured the country to build support and regain control the next year. And he is no rookie gambler; a motion of no confidence he called as leader of the opposition, in 2018, installed him as a surprise prime minister. Nor is he a bad political horse-wrangler: after elections in 2019, he pulled together an awkward minority government with the radical-left Podemos that has held together since.

All these qualities are now on display as Mr Sánchez makes another gamble. On May 29th he announced snap elections for July 23rd, after his party suffered a brutal defeat in regional and municipal elections a day earlier. The conservative opposition People’s Party (PP) not only won the regions of Valencia (a former bastion it had lost) and Aragón (an even harder target). It even won in the south-western region of Extremadura, which has been held by the Socialists almost continually since democracy was restored in Spain in 1978 following the death of Francisco Franco. Other regions and symbolic cities also swung from left to right.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP’s leader, has pursued a course of moderation in tone and in policy, and profited from the final demise of Ciudadanos, a liberal centre-right party which went into a death spiral after its decision, in 2019, not to go into government with Mr Sánchez. The PP seems to have scooped up all its voters, explaining its big gains.

Now, the two big parties must look to their flanks. On the conservative side is the hard-right Vox, which emerged in the last electoral cycle. The PP will need its support to govern in most of the regions it has just won. Vox, not content merely to support PP minority governments, wants to join regional administrations (as it already has done in one, Castilla and León). Mr Feijóo has offered Mr Sánchez a deal under which whatever party wins each region should be allowed to govern, even without a majority, in order to shut out the extremist parties. But it seems Mr Sánchez would rather force the PP to govern with Vox, and so paint July’s elections as a referendum on the rise of the hard right.

But Mr Sánchez has his own problems. His coalition partner, Podemos, was pummelled. Now the parties to the left of the Socialists must reorganise themselves quickly. Yolanda Díaz, Spain’s labour minister and a deputy prime minister, has allied with Podemos in the past, but now leads a new formation called Sumar. She pushed populist (and often popular) economic policies while Podemos nailed its banner to identity-politics issues; and a botched reform of the rape statute has dogged the party for most of a year. Sumar and Podemos have not yet decided whether to recombine. Spain’s electoral system punishes small parties; if they run separately both will suffer.

After the weekend’s elections, the momentum is solidly with the right. Mr Sánchez has little time to discover another talent: that of a general rewriting his strategy while already busy fighting. He has given himself only eight weeks to do it. ■