Spanish socialists close ranks around Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez

USPA NEWS - “The PSOE is a party that takes responsibility for Spain. Our destiny is linked to the destiny of Spain,” said this Sunday the general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE in its acronym in Spanish) and President of the Government, Pedro Sanchez, at the closing of the 40th Congress of the formation, of which the PSOE comes out "united." Two and a half years after reaching the Government of Spain thanks to a motion of censure against the conservative Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish Socialists staged unity this weekend in Valencia. Internal criticism was forgotten and everyone closed ranks around Sanchez.

"Here we are several generations of socialists who, throughout the last five decades of the history of Spain, have been embodying the continuity and renewal of the project launched 142 years ago by Pablo Iglesias and his colleagues," recalled Pedro Sanchez . The reelected head of the Socialist Party made clear his objective for this new stage: "to preserve the role of the Spanish social democracy." For Sanchez, "a strong Socialist Party is essential for the prosperity of Spain, for our future as a country" that will promote "growth and employment, strengthen social cohesion and facilitate coexistence."

Throughout his speech, surrounded by his new Executive Commission on stage, Pedro Sanchez insisted that progress in Spain bears the Socialist stamp. First, progress made by Felipe Gonzalez, then continued by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and, now, by the government he heads: we must, he said, “continue the work done and open new paths that advance in the same direction of equality and social justice.” Sanchez stressed that the history of the PSOE "is linked to the modernization of Spain."

Each generation of Socialists has tried to boost growth and employment, strengthen social cohesion and facilitate coexistence, said the Socialist general secretary. “We have been in all the agreements that have made possible the growth of our well-being and our freedom. We have worked for harmony and coexistence, and that continues to be our main political task,” he argued. “We are a strong and united party. Stronger because it is more united. A useful party for society, a party at the service of Spain,” declared Sanchez. “We maintain the identity, the values and the name. We continue to call ourselves the same as then: in southern Europe, socialists, in the center and north, Social Democrats, and in the Anglo-Saxon world, Labor. We continue to defend the same values of equality and freedom as a century ago. Others have changed their identity and present their old projects under another name, but those projects are the same ones that did not work in the past and will not work in the future,” he predicted.

"Well-being, harmony, solidarity, community and the value of the public" are concepts that Sanchez shelled throughout his speech to defend social democracy as the best option to leave the pandemic behind: "Social democracy is strong and vindicates its vigor and its validity. Our values are the values of European society. The institutions and social protection policies put in place by the Social Democracy continue to be those that guarantee the safety and dignity of people in the face of life's adversities,” he said.

“This project of progress and justice is alive here. We belong to the best and noblest political tradition that exists in the world: social democracy. We are democrats and reformists. And today the social democratic project is strong in the world,” concluded his speech.