The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, assured yesterday before the Congress of Deputies that the General State Budget for 2022 provides for an increase of 15.39% of official development assistance, which will allow to recover “the levels of a decade ago” and consolidate cooperation as “a true State policy”.
“These are budgets at the service of Spain’s foreign policy, a State policy, with the defense of the Spanish people and their values and interests as a top priority,” said the Minister during his appearance before the plenary session of the Lower House to defend the budget items of his Department contemplated in the Budget bill.
According to Albares, the consolidated budget for Foreign Affairs amounts to 1,928.65 million euros, which represents a total increase of 4.13% over the previous year and reflects a foreign action whose main objectives are “support for multilateralism, the change of the economic and social model, the digital revolution, the climate emergency and the solidarity that accompanies a fair recovery, with an increase in the items for cooperation and the Instituto Cervantes”.
With regard to support for multilateralism, the Minister recalled that Madrid will host the NATO summit in June 2022 and that Spain will assume the Presidency of the EU in the second half of next year, for which 26.21 million euros will be allocated for the “preparatory expenses” of this Presidency. Likewise, he indicated, the PGE foresees 433.40 million Euros for donations to international organizations and another 165.37 million Euros for peace operations in Lebanon, Congo, Colombia or Mali.
The Minister also highlighted the 15.39 percent increase in the item destined to official development aid (ODA), with a total amount of 3,506 million Euros and a 28% increase in the budget of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). Thanks to these budgets, he assured, ODA “will reach the levels of a decade ago” and will increase by 93.4% compared to 2015, when development aid reached its lowest levels in the PGE. This increase, moreover, will represent 0.28% of Gross National Income (GNI), compared to 0.26% in2021, which, he assured, will help the Government’s objective of reaching 0.5% of GNI by the end of the legislature and to consolidate cooperation as “a true State policy”.
The draft budget also provides an item for the modernization and promotion of the Instituto Cervantes and another amount of 110 million euros for the Consular Digital Transformation Plan, from the funds of the Recovery Plan, in order to “modernize consular information systems and technological infrastructures to provide better service to Spaniards abroad,” he explained. Likewise, the PGE include 495.53 million for the area of Administration and General Services of the Ministry, 79 million of which will be destined to the common services of the Foreign Service and the remaining 416 million to the Embassies and Consulates. Besides, the PGE will allocate 48 million Euros for the improvement and modernization of the structure and organization of the Ministry, the digitalization of its services and the move to the new headquarters in the Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, in Madrid.
Strong criticism from the PP
During the debate, the PP spokesperson before the International Cooperation Commission, Paloma Gázquez, described this budget as “entelechy” and expressed her fear that the cooperation policy is marked by Bildu. “And we already know how it would be, the funds would go to dictatorial governments, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran, and never to the oppressed population of those countries,” she said. For this reason, he asked the minister to accept the amendments proposed by the PP “aimed at the implementation and defense of democracy and human rights.
For her part, the PP spokesperson before the Foreign Affairs Committee, Valentina Martínez, reiterated her well-known argument that the Government “has taken the foreign image to the worst moment of our democratic history” and denounced that Spain has “no credibility” and, for this reason, is absent “from the main European debates”. He also accused former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of “whitewashing the cruelest dictatorships” with the “complicit silence” of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and regretted that the Government has resorted to “denial” and “censorship” to refuse to negotiate the budget with the PP and, instead, has turned to parties that “work solely and exclusively to destroy the image of Spain abroad”.
