"Where are his pants?": The photo of the Spanish Prime Minister that stirred the web

"Where are his pants?". An official photo of the Spanish Prime Minister stirs the web.

An official photo from an emergency meeting published by the office of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez went viral after it appeared as if his lower body had disappeared. The attempts by his staff to minimize damage only fueled the celebration of memes.

In the photo, which documented an emergency meeting on the refugee crisis and was shared on the X platform, Sánchez is seen looking intently at a screen, but the camera angle cut his body in a way that immediately sparked a wave of conspiracy theories, jokes, and memes at his expense.

According to reports in the Spanish newspaper "El Mundo", users raised two main hypotheses for the mystery: a particularly problematic camera angle, or failed digital editing and retouching by his media advisors. Another hypothesis that gained wide circulation on the networks suggests that Sánchez was photographed wearing only underwear, and therefore his lower body was erased in editing before publication.

In an attempt to control the strange reputational damage, the Prime Minister's communications team rushed to publish a video documenting him at the same meeting clearly wearing pants, as reported by the Russian news site Lenta.ru. However, the move was made after the photo had already been widely distributed and failed to stop the flood of mocking responses.

This is not the first time that official photos of the Spanish leader have caused a stir. Media outlets covering the event recalled an incident from 2021, during the Taliban takeover crisis in Afghanistan, when Sánchez was photographed wearing a suit but wearing espadrilles intended for the beach — a photo that was also re-edited by his office after it drew public criticism.