Spain's socialists want to abolish prostitution

Speaking to supporters at the end of his Socialist Party's three-day congress in Valencia, Mr Sanchez said that the practice "enslaves" women.

While sexual exploitation and pimping are illegal in Spain, prostitution is not officially regulated. There is no punishment for those who offer paid sexual services of their own will as long as it's not in public spaces.

Big business

Prostitution is big business in Spain. The sector has grown enormously in Spain since prostitution was decriminalised in 1995. Spaniards pay around EUR 25 billion a year to have sex with prostitutes. A 2009 survey found that up to 1 in 3 Spanish men had paid for sex, the BBC reports.

According to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office, around 500,000 women are working in brothels in the country. Approximately 80 per cent of them are victims of sex traffickers, according to the Spanish police. A 2011 UN study cited Spain as the third biggest centre for prostitution globally, behind Thailand and Puerto Rico.

The aim of the socialists is now to introduce a regulation along the lines of countries like Sweden or France, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung writes. In both countries, it is not a punishable offence to offer sexual services but to purchase them.

Single law won't be enough

The abolition of prostitution would be a considerable novelty, so much so that Sánchez has gone further in his speech than the debates for the political paper approved by the Valencia congress, Spanish newspaper El País writes.

However, a single law is probably not sufficient for this, which is why a longer and thus more cumbersome process is likely to make this project more difficult.

Since this weekend, Spain's socialist workers' party PSOE has been defining itself as an explicitly feminist party. Teresa Ribera, Spain's Minister for Ecological Transformation, tried to describe this reorientation: "The heart of the PSOE is red, but also green because we know that it is important to transform the present reality into another reality," Ribera said at the party congress in Valencia.

Minority government

Mr Sanchez heads a minority coalition government since January 2020 after his Socialist party came first in two inconclusive national elections in 2019.

The party published a woman-focused manifesto ahead of the general election held in April 2019, which proposed outlawing prostitution. The manifesto called prostitution "one of the cruellest aspects of the feminisation of poverty and one of the worst forms of violence against women."