The Diplomat
Izquierda Unida (IU) and Podemos, partners in the government of Pedro Sánchez, did not hide their discomfort yesterday with the announcement that the NATO Summit of 2021 will be held in Spain, thus opening a new front of disagreement in foreign policy within the Executive.
The spokeswoman for the IU’s federal leadership, Sira Rego, was the most forceful when it came to opposing Madrid hosting the meeting of the allies, something that was presented by Moncloa as a success of Pedro Sánchez’s participation in the Atlantic summit last Monday in Brussels, and which will guarantee that the president of the United States, Joe Biden, will visit Spain in 2022.
Rego expressed her “firm rejection” of the holding of the Atlantic Alliance Summit, an organisation she considers “clearly an instrument of war”.
According to the IU leader, “there are priorities that cannot be postponed that are more important than acting as host country for a conclave of this nature”, in reference to the serious health crisis and economic recovery.
Sira Rego acknowledged that Spain must fulfil its international commitments, but pointed out that “there is a time for everything and neither now nor next year will the primacy of Spain’s diplomatic interests coincide with those of the states that really do have practical control of NATO”.
Rego also pointed out that “when we are about to celebrate 40 years of NATO membership, after a referendum that made things clear about the role that each political force wanted to play in the construction of this country, and while the use of bases such as Rota and Morón by foreign armies is maintained, the balance points to the fact that all this has hardly contributed to achieving a fairer, safer and less militarised world, three of the objectives that its promoters have been ‘selling’ to us over these same four decades”.
“Our organisation will continue where it has always done, alongside the peaceful mobilisations and demands that civil society will surely demand on this issue in the coming months. We will continue on our way and take all the necessary steps, but we prefer to do it in the street and not in well-prepared corridors, and much better if it is together with the same associations, platforms, marches and groups with whom we have shared thousands of kilometres over the last 40 years”, he said.
For his part, the MP for En Comú Podem and first secretary of the Congress Bureau, Gerardo Pisarello, stated in a press conference that his organisation considers that NATO “is not the type of defence institution” that we should have and, therefore, “it is not a measure that they welcome”.
And the president of the parliamentary group of Unidas Podemos, Jaume Asens, indicated that the coalition has always said that NATO seems to him to be an “obsolete organisation” and that it should opt for “other models of defence”.
Furthermore, he assured that bilateral security agreements have to be ratified in Congress and, therefore, a pact between the coalition partners in the government is not enough, but also a pact between the parliamentary majority that supports it.
