Hostility towards Spain's Sánchez, measured against Zapatero and Fernando VII

The boos for Sánchez and the comparison with Zapatero

Is Pedro Sánchez the most hated leader by his own people? On the street, the answer arrives before it does in the newspaper archives: as the debate keeps repeating, wherever he shows up, protest trinc. The problem starts when you try to measure it. There is no official thermometer of rejection and, without one, two tools remain: comparison with those who held the office before him, and the intensity with which each public event turns into a standoff. Both point in the same direction. Neither settles the question.

The comparison with Zapatero and with Fernando VII

The first name that comes up is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The argument going around is that not even he, with a legislature marked by the crisis, faced such repeated booing wherever he went. Boo for boo, the hostility towards the current prime minister is perceived as more constant and louder than back then, although memory tends to embellish one's own and darken the other side's.

From there, the jump spans several centuries: some go back to Fernando VII to claim that no worse ruler has held power since that reign. It is a hyperbole, and as a hyperbole it works: it measures the feeling that the current wear has no parallel in recent memory, not even in the harshest years of the two-party system.

Is he the most hated leader in the world?

The scale stretches beyond borders. Some claim he is probably the most rejected by his own people worldwide and that, to find something comparable, you would have to look at some African dictator. Without polls to back it up, the phrase works as a gauge of the mood, not as a fact. And the mood has its classic trap: the loudest rejection is not always the largest.

Who still backs the prime minister

The other bloc of the map deserves a paragraph of its own. One line of thought holds that this support does not stem from affinity but from calculation: better him than the alternative, even without enthusiasm. Another adds a more uncomfortable ingredient: that part of the support is explained by public transfers. These are hypotheses of the debate, not proven facts, and should be treated as such.

One irony keeps coming up: describing him requires words that, said about anyone else, would be a serious insult. When the adjective runs out, the analysis has to start working with other things.

The wear does not show up in any poll

Here lies the blind spot of the whole matter. The discussion is about perceptions, videos of protests and historical comparisons, but not about homogeneous data series. Anyone wanting a figure will find, at most, counts of incidents. And a count of incidents is not a measurement of hatred: it is a measurement of conflict at public events, which are different things even though they are confused every day.

What is striking is that the discussion happens, almost without exception, in absolute terms. The most hated leader in history, the worst ruler since the 19th century, the most rejected on the planet. None of those claims survives serious scrutiny, and all of them describe something real: a level of hostility that has become routine at every appearance.

With this outlook, any occupant of La Moncloa (the Spanish prime minister's official residence) would be looking for the door. This one keeps climbing onto every podium, racking up boos and comparisons with Bourbon kings. Perhaps hatred does not measure what we think it measures.