Eduardo González
The acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, warned yesterday before representatives of the European Parliament and the national parliaments of the EU that migration crises such as the one currently affecting the Italian island of Lampedusa must be solved with “solidarity” and not with “populist responses”, while assuring that “the basic principles” of the EU are “challenged at the moment by the Russian aggression in Ukraine, but also by political forces within our societies and our States”.
“The migration and asylum pact is one of our top priorities and Spain is not going to spare any effort to reach agreements at European level on these dossiers,” Albares assured during his speech at the Conference of Specialized Bodies on Union Affairs (COSAC), which brings together twice a year representatives of the European Parliament and the committees on European affairs of the national parliaments of the EU Member States, and which was held yesterday at the Senate headquarters in Madrid.
“Spain has always played in solidarity at the European level”, assuming “the responsibility that touches us as a country of first entry”, he continued. “Right now, if you look at the entry routes into the EU, Eastern Mediterranean, Central Mediterranean and Western Mediterranean, when we have increases of 305 percent in the central route and 95 percent in the eastern route, there is a drop in entries on the route to Spain,” he assured.
“Therefore, we have always been in solidarity starting with the responsibility that touches us: the control of our external borders,” he continued. “We have also been supportive by being willing to participate in a European way and to help those States that needed it when there have been boats off the coasts of Italy, Greece, Malta, in which Spain has always said that, if we could lend a hand, and we have done so, we would do it,” he added.
Therefore, according to Albares, the solution to the European migratory challenge (such as the current avalanche of irregular migrants in Lampedusa, to which he referred in passing) “can only be European, because people do not come to this or that country, they come to Europe, and we cannot resign ourselves to the fact that the Mediterranean and the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands are, year after year, the tomb of thousands and thousands of people who choose the wrong way to improve their lives.”
“For this there is a formula, which Spain has been applying: the relentless fight against the mafias that traffic in human beings, a political dialogue at the highest level with the countries of origin and transit and the development of powerful cooperation programs to offer life alternatives to these people,” he stated. “We also have to agree on the conditions of access in a legal way” because “the guarantee that there is the possibility of legal migration is the biggest deterrent we can give to someone risking their life unnecessarily through the illegal route,” he added.
“We also have to say very clearly: no to populist responses to migration,” he said. “Conjunctural phenomena have a solution, structural phenomena are managed”, and as long as the current “differential” of development between Europe and Africa is maintained, we will be “facing a structural problem that requires European management”, he continued. “Of course, you can count on the Government of Spain, as a Member State and as Presidency of the EU, to try to reach a solidarity solution,” he added.
Precisely, the far-right Vox formation yesterday demanded that Spain join the “naval mission” proposed by the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, to curb immigration, after the arrival of thousands of migrants to Lampedusa. Meloni’s proposal, whose objective would be to prevent the arrival of the boats to the European coasts, has the support of the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen.
Ukraine and the “internal political forces”
On the other hand, Albares reiterated yesterday before the parliamentarians the need to maintain the unity of Europe “in support of Ukraine, to defend its sovereignty, its territorial integrity, its defenseless civilians”, because “we are also defending basic principles of the EU, as basic as the abolition of war in Europe to resolve conflicts between States and sovereign equality between States, but also diversity, pluralism, democracy”.
“Those principles”, which “are not just beautiful philosophical ideas, they are the very engine of European construction, of the greatest decades of prosperity and peace in Europe”, are “being challenged at the moment by the Russian aggression in Ukraine, but they are also being challenged by political forces within our societies and our States, and we also have to say ‘no’ to them with force”, he asserted.
The acting minister also assured that Spain is going to do “everything possible for the EU Mercosur agreement to advance as much as possible”. “I believe that this is a great opportunity, with the Brazil of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the head of Mercosur, for Mercosur and Europe to create not only a large free trade market, but also a large environmental protection zone, including the lungs of the planet, which is the Amazon,” he declared.
