The president defends that Spain is not alone in Europe regarding the Sahara and eleven other countries share his position
MADRID, 19 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has avoided clarifying whether the dismissal of the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Arancha González Laya in July 2021 was motivated by an express request from Morocco in this regard despite the fact that the spokesmen for PP, Vox, Ciudadanos and Bildu have insisted that he clarify this point during the plenary session held at the Congress in which the relationship with the Alaouite kingdom was one of the topics on the agenda.
Despite the fact that there have been several spokespersons who have expressly asked Sánchez about the information published by the newspaper ‘El Confidencial’ and have asked him to clarify whether Rabat demanded the dismissal of Laya to settle the diplomatic crisis that existed between the two countries, The president has not mentioned this matter during his response and counter-reply.
The fact has not gone unnoticed and the spokesmen have blamed it. “Did she dismiss the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the request of Morocco?”, The PP spokeswoman, Cuca Gamarra, asked her, demanding that she confirm the veracity or not of the information.
The ‘popular’ spokeswoman has also made her ugly that she has not answered her other questions about Morocco, such as the date for the opening of customs in Ceuta and Melilla or if she plans to dismiss the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, after saying that the kingdom Alawite is a dictatorship.
For her part, the spokeswoman for Cs, Inés Arrimadas, has been surprised by the fact that Sánchez could leave Congress “without denying” that the dismissal of Laya was demanded by Rabat. “Are you going to leave here leaving that reasonable doubt that this was the case? Are you planning to leave without saying if this is true?” Spain.
The spokesman for EH Bildu, Jon Iñarritu, has spoken along the same lines, for whom the Moroccan pressure on Laya’s dismissal is the “news of the day”. “You can’t get around it, you have to give clarification,” he asked Sánchez, warning him that this would be the most “beneficial” for him.
However, the requests have fallen on deaf ears and the president has not responded in his final speech, thus avoiding clarifying whether the departure of Laya, whom Morocco blamed for welcoming the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, in Spain, was an express request from Rabat to turn the page on the bilateral crisis, something that did not happen until April of last year.
Sánchez took advantage of the debate, in which one of the items on the agenda was the High Level Meeting (RAN) with Morocco on February 1 and 2, to value the benefits of the “new stage” in the relationship initiated with the neighboring country as a result of his meeting with Mohamed VI in April 2022 after his letter in which he supported the Moroccan autonomy plan for the Sahara.
The president has evaded giving explanations, despite the insistence of many of the spokesmen, to the reasons that led him to maintain in his letter to the Alaouite monarch that said autonomy plan is “the most serious, credible and realistic basis” for a solution to the Sahara conflict.
In this sense, he did not want to confirm if it was Morocco who was behind the espionage with the ‘Pegasus’ system to which his mobile phone was subjected, despite the fact that the PP and Cs, for example, have asked him to clarify whether compromised data was obtained that They will push him to have to align Spain with the Moroccan position.
On this issue, Sánchez has limited himself to pointing out that “there is an open legal proceeding” because he brought what happened to the attention of the justice system. “There were other presidents who had problems with their cell phones,” he added, recalling the “hold on” message that then-President Mariano Rajoy sent to the PP treasurer at the time. “That was not me”, he has finished.
Regarding the position regarding the Sahara, the President of the Government has claimed that in Europe there are eleven other countries that have the “same position” or “very similar” to the one that Spain has been manifesting. Specifically, he has said that it is about France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary, Romania, Cyprus, Austria and Greece.
“We are not alone”, he has defended, but rather “the main European countries are in the position that the Government states and maintains”, something that he has labeled as “positive”.
However, Bildu’s spokesman has denied him. “It’s not true,” he told her, denying that there are eleven other countries that share the Spanish position. “You have gone further,” he told Sánchez, recalling that Spain maintains that it is “the most realistic, serious and credible base and no European state says that.”
In addition, he reminded him that Spain is not just any European country but that it is “historically responsible for the drama of the Saharawi people”. In addition, he has finished off, if it is true that the Government is not alone, why the vast majority of Congress “has disapproved of his change of position.” “Yes, he is alone”, Iñarritu snapped at the Prime Minister, asking for a return to the “historical position”.
All in all, Sánchez has insisted that the Spanish position is in accordance with the resolutions of the UN Security Council and goes through recognizing that it will have to be the parties that reach an agreement through negotiation. What Spain can do, he added, is to support said negotiation and the UN envoy for the Sahara, Staffan de Mistura.
On the other hand, Sánchez has cited the reduction in migrant arrivals in Spain as one of the main results of the new relationship with Morocco, 78% in the case of Ceuta and Melilla and 63% in the case of the Canary Islands.
The president recalled these data in his second intervention to respond to the Vox spokesman, Santiago Abascal, rejecting the “call effect” used by his party that causes some of the government measures, such as the minimum vital income.
Likewise, he has put them in opposition to the increase in immigrant arrivals of 300% in Italy and 95% in the case of Greece and has reminded him that in the two countries there are no progressive governments like in Spain.
In this sense, he has asked the leader of Vox if he believes that the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, an ally of Abascal in Europe, is causing a “call effect”. “Migratory flows obey complex dynamics that you do not want or are not interested in understanding with your rhetoric of hatred of immigrants,” she has reproached him.
Abascal has defended himself by claiming that the Italian prime minister “has found the migratory flows diverted” by the Spanish government and has assured that when Vox governs, something that Sánchez has predicted will never happen, they will impose “a state of constitutional emergency”. like the one that Meloni has declared and not like the one imposed by the Executive during the pandemic.
