Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, today embarks on a tour of the three major petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf with the purpose of seeking public and private partners for the financing of the Government’s Recovery Plan.
Gonzalez Laya, who with this tour will complete her program of trips to the Maghreb countries and the Middle East, will leave today for the United Arab Emirates, where she will remain all day Sunday and part of Monday. That same day she will travel to Saudi Arabia and on Tuesday she will leave Riyadh for Qatar. The tour will conclude in Qatar on Wednesday, when the head of Spanish diplomacy will return to Spain.
According to diplomatic sources, the Minister’s tour will have three main objectives: to recover Spain’s political presence in the Persian Gulf region at a relevant geopolitical moment due to the arrival of Joe Biden to the Presidency of the United States, to attract investments for the Recovery Plan of the Spanish economy after the COVID-19 crisis and to promote cooperation in cultural and educational matters. According to the same sources, during her stay in the Emirates, the Minister will not meet with the King Emeritus (who “no longer performs official functions”) nor will she discuss with the Emirati authorities the presence of Juan Carlos I in this country.
Regarding the first objective, the same sources recalled that in recent years, for reasons of Spanish internal politics, there have been very few visits by a foreign minister to the region as head of delegation (apart from those accompanying the King’s trips), limited to those made by Miguel Ángel Moratinos in 2006 to Qatar and the Emirates and by José Manuel García-Margallo in 2012 to Saudi Arabia. In this area, the main objective of González Laya in these trips will be to address with the authorities of these countries the state of bilateral relations and regional issues. In fact, this is one of the first visits of a European delegation to three of the countries that starred in June 2017 in the decision of the Arab Quartet (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) to blockade Qatar diplomatically, economically and commercially, a blockade that ended last January 5 with the signing of an agreement to resume relations.
In any case, the most important point of the Minister’s tour will be related to economic diplomacy and overcoming the COVID-19 crisis. According to the aforementioned sources, the main objective of the trip in this area will be to leverage funds to invest in the technological, industrial or green economy projects envisaged by the Recovery Plan launched by the Government on the basis of the European Recovery Fund, adopted in July 2020 by the Council and which this coming Tuesday will be approved by the European Parliament. To this end, the minister will meet with heads of sovereign funds (such as the Emirati Sovereign Wealth Fund, ADIA, or the Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund, QIA) and private funds (such as the president of the Qatar Foundation, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned) of these three Persian Gulf countries, to whom she will explain the Spanish Recovery Plan and the European funds that will be available to Spain and will try to convince them to participate in the projects related to this plan.
The Minister will also meet with the large Spanish business colony present in these three countries to explore possibilities for new Spanish investments. The Spanish business presence in these countries is growing and increased considerably during the process of internationalization of the Spanish economy after the financial crisis of 2008, which resulted in the tendering of numerous projects, such as the Medina-Mecca high-speed railway or the Riyadh and Doha subways. More than 8,000 Spaniards live in the Emirates alone for professional reasons, making them the second largest Spanish community in the Arab world (after Morocco) and the largest in Asia.
The third facet of the Minister’s tour will be cultural and educational, with a visit to the Spanish Pavilion at the Dubai Expo (planned for last year and postponed to October 2021 because of the pandemic) and to the construction sites of the two soccer stadiums for the Qatar 2022 World Cup in which Spanish companies are participating. The promotion of the Spanish language will also be addressed, the main pillars of which are two Spanish private schools in the Emirates and Qatar.
