The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, yesterday expressed his conviction that the improvement of relations with Morocco, after the serious diplomatic crisis that broke out in mid-2021, “will be seen very soon”.
“Maybe not as quickly as the Twitter media times demand, but certainly with much more depth and strategic character than one can imagine and I believe that all that will be seen very soon,” said the minister during a breakfast meeting with the Spanish Maritime Cluster, held at the Casino de Madrid.
“Building a 21st century relationship means moving forward and clearing different areas and that is what we are doing and we are doing it quite solidly,” he continued. Therefore, he added, “everything will be resuming, probably not as quickly as the newspapers or Twitter would like, but with much more solidity than one can imagine.”
The minister’s declarations came after the Spanish government, in a new gesture to overcome the diplomatic crisis that opened last spring, made a commitment to Morocco to guarantee the country’s energy security, endangered by the rupture of relations with Algeria.
The Moroccan authorities asked Spain to facilitate that the liquefied natural gas (LNG), which Morocco buys on international markets, can be unloaded at a Spanish regasification plant and then use the Maghreb gas pipeline to reach its territory, according to Bloomberg. In other words, the Maghreb gas pipeline through which Algerian gas used to reach Morocco and also Spain, and which was closed a few months ago by Algiers to punish its Moroccan neighbor, will now be used in the opposite direction to the one it has been used in the last twenty years.
This friendly gesture with Morocco could have repercussions on the relationship with Algeria, the main supplier of gas to Spain. Algiers broke off diplomatic relations with Rabat last August and in November proceeded to close the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline (GME). This pipeline links Algeria with Spain via Morocco, so that, with its closure, Morocco not only loses the million-dollar ‘rights of passage’ it received from gas traffic, but also sees its energy supply endangered. In any case, Albares did not want to specify yesterday whether Algeria had been informed of this decision. “I am not going to publicly air questions of international relations of such importance,” he limited himself to replying.
