Eduardo González
The United States Ambassador to Spain, Duke Buchan III, yesterday said he was “saddened and deeply disturbed” by the seizure of the Capitol in Washington by thousands of Donald Trump supporters and stated that “those who participated in yesterday’s shameful criminal acts should be fully prosecuted”.
“I’m saddened and deeply disturbed by what transpired in Washington yesterday”, the ambassador said via the embassy’s Twitter account. “Violence has no place in our political process”, he continued. “Those who participated in yesterday’s shameful criminal acts should be fully prosecuted”, warned Buchan, who was a major donor to Donald Trump both during his campaign for the Presidency in 2016 (to which he contributed EUR 756,000) and for his re-election in 2020.
“What I, the Embassy and the American people stand for is a peaceful democratic process and respect for democratic norms and institutions”, he continued. “It was an important and comforting moment when Congress returned to continue certifying the election results”, he added. “This morning, Congress certified Joe Biden’s victory as President, and he will take office Jan. 20. As previously planned, I will depart the Embassy on the same day, leaving it in the very capable hands of our Deputy Chief of Mission, and ultimately, in the hands of the next Ambassador”, Buchan announced.
“I am grateful for the messages of support from our Spanish friends. Our shared commitment to democratic values is the basis of the strong U.S.-Spain relationship, which continues from administration to administration”, he concluded.
Political polarization in Spain
On the other hand, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, stated yesterday on his Twitter account that “the US Congress ratifies the victory of Joe Biden. Yesterday’s (Wednesday’s) attack on Capitol Hill has only succeeded in reaffirming the principles we share”. “Spain will work with the United States for a more just world and the triumph of democracy over extremism”, he concluded.
Likewise, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, declared in La Hora de la 1 on TVE that the seizure of the Capitol was “an attempt at democracy encouraged by the President of the United States himself” and that “those of us who have experienced attempts at a coup d’état know that it is very similar to that”. What happened in Washington “is difficult to compare and difficult to transfer to situations in which there may have been political polarisation in other countries in the world”, the minister said shortly before Onda Cero in relation to the comparisons made by PP and Vox between the assault on the Capitol, on the one hand, and the independence assaults on the Catalan Parliament and the Rodea el Congreso (Surrounding the Congress) initiative launched by the 15M movement in 2012, on the other.
After the initial condemnations of the Spanish political parties, the seizure of the Capitol has taken very little time to become a new opportunity to widen the political polarisation in Spain. The first political leader to throw the stone was Vox’s president, Santiago Abascal, who not only failed to expressly condemn the incidents in Washington but also stated, via Twitter, that he was surprised that “the assault on the Capitol seems so bad to the left”. “Here we have a vice president who was calling for an assault on Congress. Here we have a Generalidad governed by those who assaulted the Catalan Parliament”, he added.
For his part, the President of the PP, Pablo Casado, criticised yesterday that “other parties that criticise this assault” maintained a different position “when in Catalonia there was an attempt to assault the Parliament on two occasions, in 2010 and 2017” or in relation to Rodea el Congreso or “those marches for dignity with one hundred injured, including 60 police officers, in 2015”. According to Casado, all democrats should condemn what has happened in the United States, and it is incomprehensible “how in Spain there are still parties that try to justify it”, in reference to Vox. In the same vein, the President of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, declared yesterday that one cannot “repudiate and condemn what is being done” in the United States and, at the same time, “defend the attempt to assault the Parliament or the Rodea el Congreso. Although they are different things, they are both condemned”.
In response to these accusations against the marches around the Congress, Podemos spokesman Rafa Mayoral said yesterday that “trying to equate those who defend democracy with those who attack it is to be an accomplice to the attacks on democracy and is to be an accomplice of the ultra-right”. Likewise, the Vice-President of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, also rejected these comparisons and declared to Herrera in the Cope that “the only time” that the Congress “dealt with” in Spain was the failed coup d’état of 23 February 1981. “We must not extend or make comparisons that do not correspond”, she added.
