The father of Pedro Sanchez He wanted his two children to learn English and, to pay for them to stay abroad during the holidays, he took out a loan. This is what the socialist leader told Bertin Osborne in “In yours or in mine”, in an interview broadcast in November 2015, when he was still a candidate for the presidency of the Government.
“My father asked for a loan to pay for my brother and me for a three-week trip to Ireland in August to learn English,” he recalled. However, those stays did not turn out as his father expected. There he met other Spaniards and, as he explained with humor, he ended up taking advantage of the trip to practice something other than the language.
“I told him not to send me. What I learned there was to play ping pong”he acknowledged before the presenter. Precisely, table tennis also had its moment during the interview: Sánchez and Osborne ended up playing a match after talking about the family, studies and youth memories of the then opposition leader.
His mother started law at 40 years old.
In that conversation, Sánchez described himself as “middle class son” and spoke of his mother’s youth when he was born. “My mother had me when she was 20. I have had a very young mother,” she explained. Two decades later, she decided to resume her studies and prepare to enter university.
“When he was 40 he got access to university and started studying law. He got his degree,” he said. Thus, mother and son coincided during a period as university students: she was studying Law and he was studying Economics. When comparing their academic results, Sánchez did not claim the best record: “She got much better grades than me.”.
He also recalled his mother’s interest in politics. “My mother has a brutal political conscience. She is not a member of the Socialist Party, but she is more socialist than the entire family combined,” he assured Osborne.
Vacations in Mallorca and games with his grandfather
Ireland was not the only destination of those summers. Among his memories of family vacations also appeared Majorcaan island for which he expressed his predilection: “I am in love with the Balearic Islands. I love them.”
When talking about his paternal grandfather, Sánchez remembered the card games they shared. “He cheated a lot when we played cinquillo,” he said. His grandfather had worked as a shepherd and laborer and had emigrated to Germany to work.
The teenager who danced in Azca
The interview also left an image of Sánchez quite different from that of his political interventions. To the 14 years He liked breakdancing and went with other young people to the interior squares of Azca, in Madrid, where they met to dance.
“When I was 14, I was dressed in a tracksuit and I was a breaker,” he recalled. He lived near that area and came with friends to compete with other dancers: “There were two or three of us going to bite each other with some of them”.