Is Spain’s PM Governing Under Pegasus’ Blackmail?

Was Spain’s foreign policy reshaped by spyware, secrecy, and survival politics? The unanswered questions surrounding Pedro Sánchez’s Pegasus hack, his Western Sahara U-turn, and his sharp turn against Israel continue to cast a long shadow over Madrid.

Certainly, it has become one of the most whispered suspicions in European politics: that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s vulnerability to Pegasus spyware may explain some of the most controversial choices of his premiership. In May 2022, his government admitted that Sánchez’s phone had been compromised around mid-2021. Forensic analysis confirmed that large amounts of data were extracted. What was taken, by whom, and for what purpose remain unanswered.

The official investigation went nowhere. Spanish judges requested cooperation from Israel—home to ‘NSO Group’, the developer of Pegasus—but received none. The inquiry was eventually shelved and then reopened only to stall again. Behind the scenes, security experts and analysts pointed toward Morocco, long accused of operating Pegasus against adversaries and rivals. Rabat has consistently denied it, but the suspicions linger.

What cannot be denied is what happened next. Within months of the infections, Sánchez overturned decades of Spanish foreign policy. In March 2022, Madrid formally backed Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara, abandoning neutrality and angering Algeria. The timing is difficult to overlook: a prime minister hacked in 2021, a historic policy reversal in 2022. The diplomatic logic—migration pressure, energy politics, and Washington’s precedent—is clear. But the overlap with the Pegasus affair raises darker possibilities.

If Morocco indeed held compromising data, the incentive to press Spain into alignment on Western Sahara would have been obvious. For Sánchez, compliance would have neutralized one crisis while avoiding the exposure of whatever was taken from his device. The Spanish public still has no answers as to what that was.

At the same time, Sánchez’s stance toward Israel and Palestine hardened dramatically. By 2023, he had become Europe’s loudest critic of Israel’s Gaza campaign. In May 2024, he recognized the State of Palestine, drawing fury from Jerusalem. Yet this foreign policy profile, presented as moral leadership, also served a political function at home: it drowned out a drumbeat of corruption scandals.

The list is long. The ‘PSOE’ is still haunted by the Andalusian ERE scandal, which saw senior party figures convicted for the misuse of public funds in a scheme worth hundreds of millions. Sánchez himself was untouched by that case, but its shadow looms over the party. More immediate was the investigation into his wife, Begoña Gómez, accused of influence peddling and questionable ties to companies that secured government support. Although Sánchez denounced the probe as partisan, the optics were damaging. Added to this are a stream of allegations and convictions against PSOE officials across Spain for misuse of funds and favoritism. Each case chips away at the party’s credibility.

Here lies the convergence. Critics argue that Sánchez’s sharp pivot on Western Sahara and his relentless focus on Israel both serve as diversions. The Sahara decision neutralized Morocco, a neighbor capable of triggering migration crises at Spain’s borders. The Israel focus gave Sánchez a stage on which to posture as a statesman, all while steering public attention away from his domestic entanglements.

And then there is Pegasus. Israel, as the home of NSO Group, has unique insight into how the spyware operates. Though there is no proof that it used this knowledge against Sánchez, the mere possibility underscores his vulnerability. If compromising material did emerge, it could be used not only by Morocco but also by other actors with access to Pegasus’s architecture. In the opaque world of intelligence and diplomacy, such leverage is invaluable. Thus, I would not be surprised if Israel is waiting for the right time and the right moment to make the ‘right move’ and discreetly share what they know about a European political figure who has called the State of Israel a “genocidal” and has even dared to compare Israel’s democratic regime with Nazism.

The unanswered question remains: is Spain’s prime minister acting freely, or is he navigating policies shaped by unseen hands holding invisible files? For now, the evidence is circumstantial, the denials predictable, and the suspicions growing. But the sequence—hack, policy reversal, anti-Israel crusade, corruption diversions—reads less like coincidence and more like the outline of a pressure campaign.

If Pegasus did extract more than just data, it may be the unseen force behind Spain’s most controversial diplomatic turns. And that would mean Europe’s stability rests, in part, on secrets buried in the hard drive of Pedro Sánchez’s phone.