The Diplomat
The diplomatic dust-up opened with the radical change of the Government regarding the Spanish position on Western Sahara generated again yesterday in the Senate a new confrontation between the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the main opposition party, the PP, in which both parties raised the tone of mutual accusations.
During the debate, the PP spokeswoman in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Pilar Rojo, warned Albares that “winds of change are blowing around him because, far from solving the problems he was entrusted with, everything has been getting worse”. According to the spokeswoman, who recalled that Albares is the third Foreign Minister in the four years of Pedro Sánchez’s government, the minister “has failed to give stability to a Ministry that in recent years has failed to ensure that Spain has a foreign policy and an image at the height of our country.”
The Foreign Minister, she denounced, has not only managed that “chaos and improvisation have taken over our foreign policy”, but that “he has turned his government partners and the entire opposition against him equally”, so that “we had one crisis and now we have three”. “What led President Sanchez to make a historic turn unilaterally? Has that change been conditioned by the theft of information from his cell phone? What have they negotiated with Morocco?” she continued. “We warned you of the consequences that this change of position on the Sahara could have, but you did not listen, you did not count on anyone and you denied the possible conflict until the very moment it exploded, when Algiers first suspended the Treaty of Friendship with our country and then trade relations,” she reproached him.
“Hardly any progress has been made in the normalization of relations with Morocco”, assured the PP senator. Likewise, she continued, “instead of lowering the tensions generated with Algeria, you went to Brussels to ask Europe to come to your rescue, breaking our bilateral capacity and saying that it is the fault of the Russians”. That policy, she warned, “has led us to the most serious political and diplomatic crisis of recent years, endangering stability and good neighborly relations in a difficult region, but vital for the interests of Spain and Europe”.
In his reply, José Manuel Albares criticized the PP for its way of doing opposition in foreign policy, because “there are times when it is legitimate to be Government and opposition, but there are times to be Spain and the PP never chooses to be Spain, it always chooses to be opposition even at the expense of the sovereignty of Spain to make its decisions”.
“Spain deserves to have an opposition that has a sense of State and that defends the sovereignty of Spain to make its decisions autonomously”, warned the Minister, for whom it is not acceptable that the PP is “with third parties” instead of being with the Government “when it comes to defending our companies”. He also called on the main opposition party to clarify its specific position on Western Sahara, especially after the recent meeting of the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with the Moroccan Prime Minister, Aziz Ajanuch.
