No 50th birthday for Spain's 12-year-old president

SPANISH national president Pedro Sánchez is one in five million – literally.

This year, he turns 50, but unlike the other more than 6.5 billion inhabitants of planet earth, will not actually have a birthday at all.

Whether or not he plans to celebrate his five decades of life is another matter, but Sánchez has only had 12 birthdays, not counting the year he was born – and his last one was just a fortnight before Spain went into lockdown.

Sánchez's date of birth is February 29, 1972, meaning his milestone 'zero' birthday does not actually exist.

He was able to celebrate turning 20, and also his 40th, on the right dates – in 1992 and 2012 – but for obvious reasons, namely that leap years are always even-numbered, he did not get a 21st birthday; or an 18th, for that matter.

Pedro Sánchez will have to wait until his 60th to celebrate a milestone birthday on the actual date – in 2032, which will be a leap year – and will also be able to blow out 80 candles on the right day, in 2052.

Should he live to be 100 – not at all uncommon in Spain, which has one of the top five longest life expectancies on earth – Sánchez will be able to celebrate his entry into treble figures on the exact centenary of when he was born, in 2072.

Effectively, anyone born on February 29 only gets a 'zero' birthday every 20 years, and only when the first digit is an even number.

And with the exception of the recent Games in Tokyo, the Olympics always fall in a leap year - as do the UEFA Euros which, again, happened in a 365-day year for the first time ever last summer.

Sánchez in presidential hotseat, aged 11

Head of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Labour Party (PSOE), in power since summer 2018 when a cross-party no-confidence vote ousted his main rival, the right-wing PP, ending its leader Mariano Rajoy's nearly seven years in office, Pedro Sánchez was then elected as president in November 2019, but in a minority.

As Spain does not operate a 'first past the post' system – whereby the most-voted party automatically governs, even if they are in a very small minority – the only way a government can be formed where the leading party has fewer than half the required seats is through support from other elected MPs.

The result is that the PSOE has been running Spain in coalition with the left-wing independent party Podemos, which was merely a group of young academics desperate for change and who met weekly in a rented garage in Madrid until early 2014 when they went from total anonymity to having five MEP seats in Europe.

'World Leap-Yearers' have their own club

But back to Sánchez – Spain has never before had a president who is only 12 years old, and who will not even become a teenager until 2024.

It would have been a tough feat to find enough candidates to guarantee getting a national leader who was legally an adult but had only had as many birthdays as a schoolboy or girl, given that Spain only has around 32,000 residents born on February 29.

Back in 2020, San Sebastián's Hotel María Cristina hosted an event for leap-year babies, and around 140 party guests celebrated their birthday there.

It was organised by the Club Mundial de Bisiestos, or 'World Leap-Yearers' Club', which was set up in the year of Pedro Sánchez's (legitimate) 24th birthday, 1996, to forge connections between people born on a date that is omitted from the calendar 75% of the time.

The Club also celebrates Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, given that it was the Julian calendar – replaced in Spain in 1582 with the Gregorian calendar, the one still in use today – which first introduced leap years as a way of 'mopping up' the six extra hours on top of the 365 full days that it takes the earth to orbit the sun.

Another way might have been to give the world an extra 3.45 minutes on each day of the weekend, or 6.9 on a Sunday night to delay the arrival of Mondays, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

According to the Club Mundial de Bisiestos, the probability of being born on February 29 is one in 1,461 – although this is easy enough to calculate, since it's the sum total of the number of days in four years, or three times 365 plus 366 – but it explains why, typically, only one child in your school year might have had this unusual date as a birthday, or a non-birthday.

In practice, though, the Club's members say, in a non-leap year, they get two birthdays – because some people ring you, give you presents and want to take you out to dinner on February 28, whilst others do so on March 1.

It's okay, Pedro. You're not alone...

Famous leap-yearers, in addition to Pedro Sánchez, include cyclist Rubén Plaza, Pope Paul III (born in 1468), and Sir James Wilson who was actually born and then died on a February 29 – in 1812 and then in 1880.

Others include US rapper Ja Rule (46 this year), Italian composer Gioachino Rossini (born in 1792 and died in November 1868), Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai, born in 1896 and who lived until just 10 months before his 100th birthday, London-born actor Joss Ackland and US actress Tempest Storm (both 94 this year), Algerian pop legend Khaled Sahra of Aïcha fame (62 this year), Archbishop Bartholomew I of Constantinople (82 this year), Canadian ice-hockey star Henri Richard (86 this year), US basketball player Tyrese Haliburton (22 this year), French footballer Saphir Taïder, Russian-born swimmer Jessica Long and Bulgarian tennis star Aleksandrina Naydenova (all 30 this year), Black Sabbath musician Geoff Nicholls (born 1944, died 2017), British cricketer Alf Gover (born 1908, died 2001), and London-born free-improvisation trombone-player Paul Rutherford (born 1940, died aged 67).

Sportspersons, especially in American football, softball, cricket and basketball are well-represented in the 'leap-yearers' list – and, in fact, Sánchez himself has long been a serious amateur basketball player, winning medals as a child and teenager and enjoying success as part of his university team.

And Pedro Sánchez has had plenty of very public, high-profile birthday wishes for his 50th when he is still 49 – at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, numerous authorities and corporate exhibitors from around the globe sang 'Happy Birthday' to him.