Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will report next week before the plenary session of the Congress on the latest European Councils, the High Level Meeting (HLM) with Morocco and the situation in Ukraine.
As reported by the Lower House, the Plenary of the Congress will host next Wednesday the appearance of Pedro Sánchez to report, at his own request, on the extraordinary meeting of the European Council of last February 9 (in which the head of the Executive defended the ten-point peace plan of the President of Ukraine, Volodímir Zelenski, present at that meeting in Brussels) and on the last ordinary European Council, held on 23 February and 24 March, in which the President spoke with some of his EU colleagues about his imminent trip to China to discuss Beijing’s proposal on the conflict in Ukraine.
Likewise, and at the request of the Popular Group, the head of the Executive will give an account of the issues addressed at the High Level Meeting with Morocco, held in early February in Rabat (the first since 2015) and which represented the high point of the recovery of bilateral relations following the Spanish Government’s decision to endorse Morocco’s autonomy plan “as the most serious, credible and realistic basis for the resolution of this dispute”.
The RAN in Rabat began with controversy over Mohamed VI’s stand-off of Pedro Sanchez (an issue that is very likely to come up in Congress) and concluded with a Joint Declaration in which both sides expressed their desire to “enrich” the “relations of excellence that have always united them”, reiterated their “commitment to human rights” and pledged to “promote trade and investment”. Likewise, the two countries reached a “commitment to mutual respect” whereby both in their discourse and in their political practice they will “avoid everything that we know offends the other party, especially in what affects our respective spheres of sovereignty”, in obvious reference to Ceuta and Melilla, on the one hand, and Western Sahara, on the other. The RAN was attended by the Socialist members of the Government and with the absence of the ministers of Unidas Podemos, a minority partner in the coalition Government, which has repeatedly criticized Pedro Sanchez’s decision to recognize the Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara.
Apart from this, and also at the request of the PP, Pedro Sánchez will report to the plenary session on the situation in Ukraine and, in particular, “on the shipment of tanks and other military equipment”. This past Wednesday, the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, announced in Madrid together with her Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksii Reznikov, that “in the next” days it is planned to send, by sea, six Leopard 2A4 battle tanks after having undergone a repair process in Alcalá de Guadaira.
During an appearance in Congress at the end of March, Robles herself rejected, in response to Unidas Podemos, that the sending of military aid would contribute to an escalation of the conflict and assured that “there is no possibility of sending Spanish soldiers to Ukrainian territory” and that neither will fighter planes be sent, as other countries are already doing. He also announced that four more Leopard 2A4 will be repaired and sent to Ukraine on a date yet to be determined, as Pedro Sanchez himself announced during his recent meeting with Zelenski in Kyiv.
