Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, took advantage yesterday of the approval of the Report on the next Spanish Presidency of the EU to warn the PP that “any elimination or reversal” of the conditions agreed with the European Commission entails “sanctioning procedures and a halt” in the disbursement of European funds.
The Council of Ministers yesterday approved the Report on the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2023. The exact content of the report, which includes the priorities of the Spanish semester and which does not appear in the References of the Council of Ministers, will be explained tomorrow at a press conference by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.
In any case, Albares appeared yesterday at the press conference following the Council meeting to advance some of the contents of the report. According to the Minister, of the more than 300 open dossiers that the current Swedish Presidency has passed on to Spain, the Government has given priority to 120 so that they can go ahead before the European elections in June 2024, including the reform of the electricity market, the reform of the EU governance system and the Migration and Asylum Pact. In addition, he highlighted among the priorities of the Presidency the return of peace to Ukraine and recalled that the Spanish semester will coincide with the celebration in Brussels of the EU-CELAC Summit, which – Albares said, in the absence of an official announcement – will be attended by Pedro Sánchez.
As the Minister also explained at the press conference, the report is the result of the work carried out since February 2022 by the organizing committee of the Presidency, which includes all the Ministries. He also affirmed that the Government has designed the Presidency “as a real country project” to which all the autonomous communities have been added and which has counted on the contributions of the parliamentary forces and the Spanish MEPs “who have wanted to collaborate”.
In this regard, Albares responded to the criticisms made by the PP for the alleged lack of communication on the Spanish Presidency by recalling that the MEPs of the main opposition party boycotted last April a meeting called by himself in Strasbourg to discuss the Presidency because they had conditioned their attendance to Sánchez’s meeting with the popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. “Why did all but the PP MEPs attend? Why does the PP not want to participate in a state policy in something like the European Presidency, which is also a national project?” he asked.
On the other hand, Albares took up yesterday the words pronounced the day before by Pedro Sánchez during the event for the anniversary of the newspaper Cinco Días in which he warned that any repeal of the reforms agreed by Spain with the EU by a new right-wing government could result in the withdrawal of the 140,000 million euros committed to Spain in the framework of the European recovery funds.
“It’s not that the president raises a hypothesis, it’s how the funds work,” the foreign minister declared. “Once the conditions and the framework are agreed with the European Commission, any elimination or reversal of the measures adopted immediately lead to sanctioning procedures and the stoppage of the consequent disbursements,” he continued. In fact, he said, other countries have already suffered sanctions for this reason.
