The Diplomat
The second vice-president of the government, Yolanda Díaz, has furthered her dissociation from Pedro Sánchez on the relationship with Morocco and the future of Western Sahara, after she described the Maghreb country as “a dictatorship” a couple of weeks ago.
According to journalist Ignacio Cembrero in El Confidencial, the leader of the Sumar project attended an event on 28 April at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, organised by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) under the title “Democratising the economy to advance equality”.
At this event, Enrique Santiago, deputy and secretary general of the PCE, made a parenthesis in his speech to welcome Abdullah Arabi, the Polisario Front representative in Spain. From the platform where she was also present, Yolanda Díaz blew a kiss in the air to Arabi, and when the act was over, she embraced him in a big hug and was photographed in his company and that of Enrique Santiago.
The vice-president’s gesture has provoked different reactions in Rabat and Algiers. Thus, the Moroccan digital newspaper H24info reported what happened at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, headlined “Sahara: the umpteenth provocation of the Spanish minister Yolanda Díaz“, and underlined that the Vice-President “has never hidden her animosity towards Morocco”. It added that she is acting in this way now “in order to put herself in a good position for this electoral period”, and sentences “Once again, Sánchez and his team will have to act as firemen in order not to damage the new path taken by Rabat and Madrid”.
In contrast, Algeria’s official press agency APS, noted that Díaz “renews his commitment to support the struggle of the Sahrawi people, an attitude which, according to Algerian columnists, endorses the thesis of the country’s president, Abdelmajid Tebboune, who has claimed on several occasions that the change in Spain’s foreign policy was an “individual” decision by Sánchez that did not have the backing of any political force.
Sumar’s proposal on Western Sahara argues, in contrast to Sánchez’s approach, that ‘any lasting solution to the conflict requires negotiations with the Polisario Front that respects the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination’. In making his policy shift on the former Spanish territory just over a year ago, Sánchez described Morocco’s autonomy proposal as “the most serious, credible and realistic” way of resolving the dispute.
