Luis Ayllón
Director de The Diplomat in Spain
Of all the options Pedro Sánchez had when forming his government to appoint a foreign affairs minister, he chose possibly the least suitable. It is said that Arancha González Laya was recommended by Nadia Calviño, who appreciated her work as an expert in international trade, something that has been shown to be insufficient to take charge of Spanish foreign policy. At least to take charge in an adequate manner.
González Laya said, on arriving at the Palacio de Santa Cruz, that “Spain is back”, which was certainly not an original expression and has a rather strong hint of adanism, as if everything that had been done up to then was useless. But the minister was right. Spain is back. Yes, it is back. It has gone back to being practically invisible in the international arena.
There is not a single initiative in international politics in which Spain has been a protagonist, beyond the propagandist proclamations of Iván Redondo’s factory.
I do not recall any dispute in which our country has taken the initiative at the European level. We always wait to join in with what others say.
It is not very clear where we are heading in our relations with a region such as Latin America, which has always been our natural projection and which now we do not even have our own State Secretariat, because it was subsumed under the Foreign Affairs Secretariat.
Our attempts to occupy positions at the multilateral level have almost always ended in resounding failures. And Sánchez is waiting for the NATO summit in a few days’ time to see if he can at least greet Joe Biden in a corridor.
We have, however, equipped ourselves with a widely publicised External Action Strategy, in which what really matters is not achieving certain objectives in this or that region, consolidating our position as interlocutors in a certain part of the world, reinforcing our presence in certain countries or helping to ensure that Spain’s interests are taken into account. None of these things. Our great goal, as the “nodal country” that we apparently want to be, is to practice a “feminist foreign policy”, a goal that, because it is so diffuse, even makes us long for the good-natured Alliance of Civilisations that Zapatero promoted hand in hand with the now reviled Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan. At least the money invested in this initiative has ended up being used by former minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos to lead it.
It is true that many of the countries around us also have among their objectives to correct the discrimination suffered by women and to facilitate gender equality in international forums, but they do not make this laudable endeavour the main focus of their foreign policy. They are looking for more concrete and tangible things.
Our Foreign Ministry has displayed commendable zeal in instructing diplomats on how they have to work to achieve this goal of feminist foreign policy and how to banish homophobic attitudes. This is all well and good, but surely the Spanish embassies would appreciate an emphasis on how to deal with the various disputes that arise around the world and in which Spanish interests are often at stake.
Most diplomats, whose opinions she often fails to take into account, are not exactly happy with the minister. González Laya has never been in tune with them. Not only did he fail to heed their warnings last year to resolve staff transfers as soon as possible, given the difficulties involved in moving at the time, but he has needlessly held up the appointment of new ambassadors for more than five months. An embassy such as India’s has been without an ambassador for seven months, and the UK’s for four months, due to the retirement of the incumbents, something that was known in advance. These are not minor embassies and it does a disservice to Spain’s image that they are unfilled.
But they have not only clashed with the diplomats, but also with the rest of the foreign service staff, by not defending the need for them to be vaccinated against COVID – because many are in countries where it is difficult to access vaccines – and by not fulfilling their commitments to offer a vaccination plan, as all the trade unions reproached them for doing.
I cannot recall any foreign minister who has had the ability to take on, in such a short space of time, the vast majority of the workers on whom the smooth running of the department depends.
And if the internal management will remain – I am fully convinced – in the memory of the workers, the external management leaves something to be desired, although, possibly, this is not entirely the fault of González Laya, who, of course, cannot be blamed for not being on videoconference every day with her colleagues around the world and for not telling us about it on Twitter.
Because, yes, the minister is very active on social networks. She likes them a lot. Much more than press conferences, which she does not usually avoid, but in which journalists ask questions that end up bothering her from time to time, as happened recently in the wake of the clash with Morocco over the reception of the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali. And yet the crisis had not yet broken out, with the massive influx of immigrants into Ceuta. This is one of the biggest crises with Morocco, and González Laya had a lot to do with its outbreak, among other things, for not listening to or even asking for advice from those who could have given it. Offering to do Algeria a favour and thinking that Rabat would not be aware, almost immediately, of Ghali’s arrival in Spain shows a lack of knowledge of how our neighbours to the south work.
It may not be fair to lay all the blame on his shoulders, because, above all, he has a head of government, who is the one who finally gives the go-ahead for the operation, but, of course, the mistake is a major one and leaves his position in the executive very much in tatters. At this point, Sánchez is more than aware that he made a mistake in entrusting González Laya with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It is true that dismissing or forcing González Laya to resign at this point would not be a good decision, because Morocco could interpret it as a triumph in its strategy of blackmailing Spain. But, in the context of a wider reshuffle such as the one that is looming in the coming months, the foreign minister is likely to be one of the ones to be discarded. And no one will find this strange.
