Speech by the President of the Government of Spain at the closing event on the occasion of International Women's Day

SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE GOVERNMENT OF SPAIN, PEDRO SÁNCHEZ

Thank you very much. Third vice-president, dear Sara, Minister for Equality, Ana, ministers, director of the Prado Museum, president of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum, dear Javier, director of the Women's Institute, authorities, friends.

It has been said before. Today we meet to commemorate International Women's Day, which we celebrate this coming Sunday, and the first thing I want to do is to thank you all. Thanks to all the women here today, who represent many others who have not been able to join you; to those of you who work in the public sector - the role that has been championed here - but also to those of you who work in the private sector, in the social sphere and within the family; to those of you who have fought tirelessly without recognition so that today your fellow women have more rights.

Not only have you changed your immediate surroundings, but I believe you have done something much more important, and that is that you have been part of something much bigger: feminism. Yesterday, the Minister for Equality and I shared this reflection with this amazing woman, Giséle Pelicot.

Feminism is a universal cause. According to the UN, only 14% of all women and girls live in countries with strong legal protections that guarantee their most fundamental rights. Only 14%. And more than 60% of countries still have no rape laws based on the principle of consent. We are therefore talking about the fact that women's rights - and therefore the rights of society as a whole - are still fragile, very fragile, in a large part of the world.

This has also been made clear in the online world. In a country as deeply committed to feminist values as Spain.

Precisely for this reason, out of respect for the millions of women and girls who suffer oppression all over the world, as the minister Ana Redondo argued earlier, we cannot accept that freedom is invoked when it is convenient and forgotten when it gets in the way.

The rights of women and girls, the freedoms of peoples, must never be an alibi for launching wars that serve other interests, an argument for bombing another country.

That is why I will say it loud and clear: if we really believe, and I think we do, if we really believe in the freedom of Iranian women, the answer cannot be more violence. It must be more diplomacy, more support for those fighting from within, and of course, more international law.

It is curious to hear, even today, that it seems contradictory to defend international law and human rights, when the defence of human rights is a central tenet of international law. To say that human rights must take precedence over international law, to say that one must take precedence over the other, is like saying that there can be a compass without a north.

We in the Government of Spain - but also Spanish society as a whole - have always condemned and repudiated the Iranian regime, and in particular, its oppression of women. We raised our voices after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, shouting "Women, life and freedom". But with the same conviction with which we did that in 2022, or recently with the repression that the Iranian people, and particularly women, have suffered; with the same conviction we condemn the destruction of schools and hospitals that now leaves hundreds of victims, many of them women and girls.

Spain, as we well know, is among the most advanced countries in the world in terms of gender equality, but what that does not give us is moral superiority; what it gives us is greater responsibility. That is why we deploy a feminist foreign policy, because we consider that feminism is a cross-cutting policy, not a sectoral one, which should permeate each and every one of the policies we launch and apply from the Government of Spain. And we invest in equality also beyond our borders.

To give you an idea, by 2026 at least 25% of our humanitarian aid will be directed towards women and girls, because equality is clearly not imposed by force: it is built through consistency and commitment, always championing peace rather than the hatred and misery that conflicts bring.

And also through upholding the multilateral order and the role of the UN, which has recently been undermined by each of the wars, the crises we are currently facing, and the conflicts that have been put on hold, if not weakened.

Incidentally, we believe that the time has come for equality in capital letters: the time has come for the next secretary-general of the UN to be a woman.

You know even better than I do that the road to justice and equality has never been easy. None of the progress we have made in Spain has been a given. It has taken a lot of effort, a lot of perseverance, a lot of courage, something to which this government has contributed over the last eight years, strengthening crucial laws to protect women;

And all this, always, always, thanks to the courage and determination, of course, of you, of the feminist movement.

But if there is one thing this progressive coalition government knows, it is that equality is also at play at the end of the month. Minister Ana Redondo said it earlier: when we talk about the minimum interprofessional wage, we are talking about the fact that 60% of the beneficiaries are working women. Thanks to the labour market reforms, we have reduced the proportion of women in temporary employment by more than ten percentage points, and we have effectively improved the pensions that women receive, with a 38% increase in terms of retirement pensions.

This means that millions of older women - many of them widows - can now pay for electricity or shop with a little more peace of mind, thanks to these increased pensions. Of course, we know that this is not enough: that a woman's pension is still much lower than that of a man. And the underlying reason lies in the decades of personal sacrifices and interrupted careers made precisely in order to care for their family members. But I believe we are on the right track, because in the end equality must also be reflected in the payroll. And there, I think, we are winning many battles.

Where we are definitely not winning - and as has been said here before: technology is, in fact, political, because technology is power - we too must understand this when we are faced with what is happening on social media. Social media, what is happening to women, and the violence you are enduring, is a symptom of a much bigger problem, and that is the lack of control there is over the technological revolution and in the development of forms of intelligence that are so present in our daily lives, such as artificial intelligence, to mention the most relevant one.

So we are not winning that battle; we have a lot of battle left to fight. It's something we all effectively carry around in our pockets: social media on our mobile phones. And these social networks have, in fact, very little of social about them and are actually very similar to a kind of physical network that captures and suffocates you.

Last Tuesday, we presented a report - and I'd like to say thank you in this regard to the Women's Institute for its vital contribution and leadership - which gave really chilling data on the current reality, which some of our colleagues have also illustrated today with their personal testimony.

The fact that women are 27 times more likely to experience online harassment than men seems to me to be a relevant enough figure to know exactly how serious a challenge we face.

In Spain, more than two and a half million women have therefore suffered digital harassment at some point in their lives, and 28% of them have decided to intentionally reduce their online activity. What for? In short, to protect themselves, as was mentioned here before: to censor themselves in some way and try to step out of the spotlight.

Behind every statistic there are stories, and these are the ones we have witnessed today. For example:

You are 15 years old: you record a TikTok dance with your friends, you repeat the choreography ten times until you get it right. It's just a bit of fun, but after a while you get a notification that someone has taken a screenshot of your video, uploaded it to another social network, and underneath there are hundreds of comments with "grok, strip them naked".

You're 24 years old: you upload a photo to Instagram; you zoom in on a part of your body you don't like and you delete it. Minutes later, your feed is flooded with retouches, unrealistic filters and miracle surgeries.

You are 40 years old: you take part in a podcast talking, for example, about equality. You defend rights that you thought were consolidated. Someone cuts an argument from that podcast, takes it out of context, and attaches a label that says "woman of low value" to it.

You are 60 years old: we are going to call you "doctor". You defend the public health care to which you have dedicated your whole life. You upload photos of a demonstration. The day after, hundreds of trolls call you "Charo".

These are four different ages, four life stages, but they all show one thing: the conviction that some people have the right over your body, your image and your voice. That they can ask a machine to undress you, turn your insecurities into a business, label you, degrade you, ridicule you, and even silence you.

These are not coincidences or anecdotes: they are a reality. This is happening. Violence against women has found a new battleground in the digital space.

Someone might think this is just social media noise, a way of trivialising it and downplaying the impact it has on the lives of millions of women; so it is enough, therefore, to switch off the mobile phone. But when the result is less voice, less presence, more self-censorship on the part of women, we are not dealing with noise: we are dealing with a form of inequality. We are facing a curtailment of women's freedom and, therefore, of the freedoms of all of us. And so we are dealing with a new form of violence.

Obviously, I can't explain what it's like to go through this any better than you can, but I can and must listen, learn and take my share of the responsibility. It has been said here that the Government has to take more responsibility. Let's do just that.

I have also taken on board some of the ideas you have mentioned. I think, without being an expert, that we are going to get in touch with you to know exactly how we can help you on the path to reduce as much as possible the chance of digital violence which, unfortunately, many of you present here have suffered.

There may well be other political leaders who are torn between protecting our daughters on the internet, or our young children, or pandering to the richest man in the world. I, of course, am not torn. And I know you are not torn either.

Moreover, I believe that this issue should not be politicised. Or rather, it should not be ideologised. Get political, of course, because there is a political battle. But it is clear that there are many people who vote for one political party or another who, when they think of their sons and daughters or their families, can in no way agree with this type of harassment, and this type of violence.

Digital harassment is yet another manifestation of the misogyny we know all too well; the misogyny that has not disappeared from our daily lives. Nor from our companies, our institutions or our political parties. Because, unfortunately, cases of harassment of women continue to occur. And they are nothing more than an expression of this patriarchal culture we must all continue to wear away at, eliminate, extinguish and extirpate from our society.

The difference is not whether or not the problem exists - because machismo does indeed permeate the whole of society. The difference is how you respond when you come across it, and also who is in the organisations. When there are feminists involved, the issue is clearly not downplayed, nor is it trivialised, nor are those in power shielded: action is taken with determination, with strength and, therefore, with decisiveness

Because machismo is not an anecdote. Rather, this is how it should be conceived: it is a structure, it is a culture. And when that culture and structure is not dismantled, what follows can indeed be irreversible.

And the irreversible thing is, once again, the fact that already in the year 2026, ten women and two children have been murdered as a result of gender violence and vicarious violence. Twelve lives in just one week; twelve lives cut short. That makes 1,353 since 2003.

Sometimes, even when I say it, we say it almost without taking a breath, as if it were just another statistic. And sometimes I have the feeling - even when we see the images of suffering in Gaza, as the Minister for Equality said earlier, or in Ukraine for so many years now - sometimes I have the feeling that as a society we are becoming anaesthetised to the numbers, and therefore we are losing empathy. We keep repeating the facts, but it feels as though they are starting to lose their real impact on our consciences, to the extent that they no longer spur us into action.

But I think it is important to keep repeating it: 1,353 deaths, which are 1,353 failures as a society, because each of those lives are stories with names and surnames. They are life projects that are no longer.

You know what in my view would be truly devastating? That as well as losing them, we would also lose sight of what we are fighting for and, as a result, come to accept the inevitable as normal. Because it is neither normal nor inevitable. We have levers, tools to be able to prevent this. No decent society can normalise this barbarism.

That is why I believe there is something else we must dare to say. There are surveys that make us uncomfortable and that force us to listen. Over the last five years - you may have seen this recently in the media; it didn't make the front pages, of course - but it's a rather worrying figure: over the last five years, the percentage of young people who identify as feminists has fallen by 12 percentage points. In five years, 12 percentage points less among young people.

And I think it would be a mistake for those of us who consider ourselves feminists - like you - to dismiss this figure with a certain moral superiority or to look the other way, as if it were not relevant. Because it is relevant.

For indeed, the reactionary movement has succeeded in tarnishing one of humanity's noblest causes. A cause that stands for equality, justice, the expansion of rights - not only for women, of course, but also, above all and first and foremost, for society as a whole.

It has been said over and over again by this reactionary wave that feminism is hatred of men, that it is privilege, that it is an ideological imposition. And this attack, therefore, is not without reason. This reactionary wave is fuelled by division and is gaining strength in its opposition to equality. They have campaigned against this word, against the word "feminism", and they have even managed to make many men utter it with a certain mistrust, even if they are committed to equality and the feminist cause.

But there is one thing they haven't managed to do, and that is to erase reality. Because, even if they reject the label, they live every day in a society that is objectively better thanks to feminism.

Therefore, thanks to feminist associations and to you, many young people who say "I am not a feminist" defend feminist principles: they defend that their partner should have the same rights; that their sister should be paid the same for the same job; that their mother should not have to endure violence; and that their friends should be able to go home alone without fear.

That is feminism, even if they don't want to call it that. That is feminism.

When they recognise the right of a father to care for his child without apologising for it; or the right of a young man who chooses to study early childhood education or, let's say, nursing, without anyone questioning his manhood. That is also feminism.

Or when they can say they are exhausted, have anxiety, are struggling with mental health issues or need help without it being interpreted as a sign of weakness. That is feminism, even if they don't want to call it that: it is feminism.

But we are going to do just that. Yes, let's call it feminism. We will still call it by its name. Because if we let them take away our words, tomorrow they will try to take away our rights.

And history shows that every step forward in equality has been preceded by a campaign that dismissed it as exaggerated, unnecessary or dangerous. It was also said that women's suffrage would destroy the family, that labour equality would ruin the economy, that laws against gender violence would destroy freedom.

And, in fact, it has been quite the opposite. Women's suffrage only dignified democracies. Labour equality has not done what they predicted, but has grown as it has not done in decades. And the fight in Spain -and from Spain- against male violence has not only made us freer, but has made us an example to the world.

So, my friends, we are, of course, not at the finish line. Nor are we at the starting line. We have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. And what we have built together we will not surrender to resignation, nor will we surrender it to cynicism.

That is why I would like to conclude with a very concrete and direct message to the enemies of the feminist cause: you will not be able to defeat us. Because we are stronger. Because we have the power of reason. And also the unique power of the debt of history. Because these are centuries of struggle and decades of progress, which will not be halted no matter how hard the linguistic charlatans and ideologues of this reactionary wave try.

And we will do so, moreover, with great composure, with great calm, with our feet firmly on the ground, and also with the certainty that equality is never excessive: it is simply the minimum requirement of societies that aspire to be worthy.

So, my friends, let's keep going. Let us never turn back.

(Transcript edited by the State Secretariat for Communication)