Yesterday, the Prime Minister closed the political season with his usual triumphalist tone regarding the performance of the economy. A tone constantly refuted by reality and by surveys of Spaniards, which point to “housing” and the economic crisis as their main problems.
Spain’s indisputable GDP growth, above 2%, is fundamentally due to the year-after-year population increase of almost half a million immigrants annually. This, combined with NextGen funds and a steady rise in tourism, boosts GDP—but not the per capita income of Spaniards, which remains 8 percentage points below the European average.
Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, an indicator used to measure household disposable income and purchasing power, has barely grown by €1,700 since Pedro Sánchez arrived at La Moncloa. This represents a 6.3% improvement according to Eurostat, far from the 9% growth in real income boasted by Sánchez during his triumphalist end-of-term review at La Moncloa. Furthermore, this figure is 28% lower than the OECD average.
In purchasing power parity, Spain remains eight points below the European Union average. In 2025, we closed at 91.59%, one point below the 92.57% average we had in 2017 under the Partido Popular government. Spain remains the 15th country in terms of GDP per capita in the EU (out of 27 members), despite being the fourth-largest economy by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) after Germany, France, and Italy. This data also indicates that we are nearly €6,000 away from the European average of €34,120, and €9,000 away from the eurozone average, which stood at €36,940. In the former case, the gap in Europe’s favor has increased by just under €1,000 since 2018.
Following Sánchez’s appearance, Alberto Nadal, the head of Economy for the Partido Popular (PP), recalled that the real net median wage fell by 3.4% between 2018 and 2024. This is because accumulated inflation during Sánchez’s government (17.3% from June 2018 to December 2025) and taxes offset all wage increases.
