The Prime Minister who found his moral compass in a song contest

"This year we will not be at Eurovision, but we will do so with the conviction of being on the right side of history."

Pedro Sánchez wrote those words on X with apparent sincerity. He meant them as a statement of moral courage. They read as something closer to self-parody.

Spain is boycotting Eurovision. Because Israel is participating. A song contest. This is where Spanish foreign policy has arrived.

To understand Sánchez, you must understand his political situation. He does not govern with a majority. He governs on the sufferance of far-left and regionalist parties whose hostility to Israel, and to the United States, is not merely ideological but visceral, tribal and non-negotiable.

Without their votes, he falls. With their votes, he must pay a price. And the price, it turns out, includes the systematic dismantling of Spain's relationship with the democratic world's most embattled ally.

Since the morning after the Hamas massacres of 7 October 2023, when 1,200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered, mutilated and kidnapped in the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, Sánchez has positioned himself as Israel's most vociferous European critic.

Not a measured critic. Not a constructive critic. A critic whose statements have, on multiple occasions, veered so close to antisemitic tropes that several European partners have felt compelled to privately express their discomfort.

He recognised a Palestinian state. He awarded Francesca Albanese,  the UN rapporteur formally accused by Germany, France and Italy of bias and misconduct, Spain’s Order of Civil Merit, calling her "a voice that supports the conscience of the world." He has maintained conspicuous silence on Hezbollah's role in dragging Lebanon into war, on Hamas's hostage-taking, on Iran's missile strikes across the Gulf.

And now he is boycotting Eurovision.

The right side of history

Let us examine that phrase carefully. The right side of history. In Sánchez's telling, this means standing against Israel, a democracy under existential threat, and by implication, standing with the political forces that have spent decades working to destroy it.

It does not mean standing with the 1,200 murdered on 7 October. It does not mean standing with the Lebanese civilians dragged into a war by a militia that answers to Tehran. It does not mean standing with the Israelis living under rocket fire, or the Gulf civilians killed by Iranian drones.

Those people, apparently, are on the wrong side of history.

The Eurovision boycott is, in its own way, the perfect expression of Sánchezism. It costs nothing materially. It requires no courage, quite the opposite.

It plays perfectly to the gallery of his far-left coalition partners. It generates headlines. It lets him post on X about moral conviction while delivering precisely zero benefit to a single Palestinian civilian.

It is gesture politics at its most naked, a prime minister who has confused posturing with principle, and who has decided that the best use of Spain's diplomatic capital is to absent itself from a television singing competition in protest at the presence of a democratic nation.

If this is the right side of history, history has a great deal to answer for.

What it reveals

Sánchez will present this as a brave stand. His partners will cheer. His coalition will hold, for now.

And Spain will be absent from Eurovision while Israel performs, because a Spanish prime minister decided that solidarity with the most anti-Israel factions of the European far-left matters more than the basic norms of democratic coexistence.

The truly damning thing is not the boycott itself. It is what it reveals about a man who has been willing, consistently and deliberately, to exploit the suffering of the Middle East's most vulnerable populations - Palestinian and Israeli alike - for the narrowest of domestic political purposes.

Pedro Sánchez has found his right side of history. It happens to be the side that cheers when Israel is excluded, isolated and delegitimised.

Draw your own conclusions.