The Diplomat
The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, considered this Thursday that the Spanish Government “has made a fool of itself” in its positions on the conflict between Israel and Hamas, with statements by “some member of the acting Executive” in which they criticized the actions Israelis of “genocide.”
Núñez Feijóo, who participated in the summit of the European People’s Party in Brussels prior to the autumn European Council, highlighted the existing discrepancies within the Government, due to the positions held by ministers such as Ione Belarra or Irene Montero, which do not coincide with the of the president, Pedro Sánchez, or the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares.
The leader of the Popular Party told journalists that he had apologized for that situation to his European colleagues, on behalf of the Spanish, and insisted: “We have made a fool of ourselves in the face of the war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have made a fool of ourselves when “We hosted the NATO summit and we do it again in the conflict against Hamas terrorism.”
“Some member of the acting Spanish Executive has said things like that Israel is producing a genocide, that Mr. Netanyahu has to appear before the International Criminal Court and unfortunately the acting president, Mr. Sánchez, has not disavowed or stopped the people who are part of your Government for defending this type of anti-European approaches,” he said.
After stating that “we cannot get used to these outbursts in international politics,” Feijóo stated that “our Government has embarrassed us again” and criticized that Sánchez took “two weeks” to speak with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after the Hamas attack on October 7.
On the other hand, the leader of the PP met, during his stay in Brussels, with the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, with whom he discussed the amnesty that the Government seems willing to grant to the Catalan independentists. Feijóo did not give many details of the meeting with Reynders, stating that the commissioner knows the situation in Spain very well. “He has traveled, he has recently been in Barcelona with the president of the Generalitat, he will return… and he has a lot of information about what is happening in the area,” he said.
