Even as anti-corruption investigators battered down the doors of his party headquarters this week, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez remains, by some distance, Europe’s most politically adept leader. Think Charlie Haughey with a sun tan.

Madrid’s socialist prime minister of eight years has reshaped Spanish politics in his image through a toxic blend of Latin American-style corruption and coalitions with Catalan and Basque separatists that directly gambles the future unity of the Spanish state to keep him in power.

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