# Why Spain's Socialists Are Thriving While Britain's Labour Collapsed > Pedro Sánchez is entering his eighth year in power on a fragile coalition, while Keir Starmer burned through a historic majority in under two years. A Foreign Policy analysis argues the gap comes down to leadership, not just economics. - Source: Foreign Time - Canonical URL: https://foreigntime.com/article/sanchez-starmer-burnham-spain-britain-left-wing-divergence - Author: Foreign Time Newsroom - Section: World Politics - Published: 2026-08-21T17:02:10.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-21T17:02:10.000Z - Tags: World Politics, Spain, United Kingdom, Labour, Pedro Sanchez --- Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned after less than two years in office, replaced by Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester. It was a precipitous collapse for a leader who had won a 2024 landslide, and it stands in sharp contrast to his Spanish counterpart, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who recently entered his eighth year in power and is gearing up for reelection, according to Bard College politics professor Omar G. Encarnación writing in Foreign Policy. Sánchez has survived the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of the far-right Vox party, corruption scandals involving his own family, and an immigration crisis that saw roughly 70,000 people storm the Spanish enclave of Ceuta last month. The contrast is sharper given the two leaders' starting positions, the analysis notes. Sánchez governs a fragile coalition in which his own Spanish Socialist Workers' Party does not even hold the most seats in Spain's parliament, a distinction that belongs to the conservative People's Party. Starmer, by comparison, entered office with 411 of 650 House of Commons seats, one of the largest working majorities in British history, and still could not hold on to it. Encarnación traces some of that gap to raw economic performance: Spain's economy grew almost 4 percent in 2024 and 2.9 percent in 2025, fueled by a post-pandemic tourism surge that led the Economist to rate it the world's top rich economy for 2024, while Britain's growth crept from 1 percent to a still-lackluster 1.3 percent over the same stretch. But the piece argues structure and cohesion matter as much as economics. Spain has had just seven leaders since its 1978 democratic constitution, averaging six years each, while Britain has cycled through six prime ministers since the 2016 Brexit referendum, one of whom, Liz Truss, lasted only 49 days. Sánchez's coalition, anchored by his party and the multi-party Sumar alliance, is described as ideologically unified on immigration, European integration, and opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Labour, by contrast, is portrayed as unable to speak with one voice: immigration split the party as Starmer tried to head off pressure from the right, and the Iran war exposed further fractures after Starmer limited U.S. use of U.K. bases to "defensive" purposes, a far more cautious stance than Sánchez's outright refusal to let the U.S. use joint Spanish-American bases for the war. Encarnación credits much of Sánchez's staying power to a pattern of political audacity that began with his 2018 rise: after a 2016 election loss and resignation from parliament, he retook control of his party in a primary against its own establishment, then engineered a no-confidence vote that made him prime minister while he held no seat in parliament, a first in Spanish history. In office, the piece credits him with raising the minimum wage by roughly 60 percent, expanding labor protections for women and LGBTQ+ workers, granting amnesty to some 500,000 undocumented immigrants, and becoming the first major European leader to call the war in Gaza a genocide and recognize Palestinian statehood, moves that have made him popular abroad even as corruption scandals involving his wife and brother have hurt him at home and fueled opposition calls for early elections. Whether Burnham can replicate any of that is, in Encarnación's telling, an open question, though there are echoes of Sánchez's path in Burnham's own comeback: he resigned as Greater Manchester mayor last month specifically to reenter parliament and take the top job, engineered largely by persuading party insiders rather than the electorate. Unlike Starmer, whose appeal rested on not being a career politician, Burnham has spent decades as a party insider, giving him, in the analysis's view, a better feel for managing Labour's factions. Britain's next election isn't expected until August 2029, giving him time that Starmer never had to try to turn the party around. --- Originally published by Foreign Time. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://foreigntime.com/article/sanchez-starmer-burnham-spain-britain-left-wing-divergence.