Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will make an official visit to Morocco today, when barely a year has passed since the High Level Meeting in Rabat and just a few days before two years of the drastic change of course of the Spanish Government regarding the contentious of Western Sahara, which allowed the recovery of bilateral diplomatic relations.
According to the Secretary of State for Communication, Sánchez will travel accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Manuel Albares. “Morocco is a neighboring country, friend and strategic partner of Spain in all areas,” states the press release. “This visit, which takes place at the beginning of this new legislature, underlines the deep ties that unite both countries,” he adds. The press release also indicates that Sánchez will be received by the Moroccan Prime Minister, Aziz Ajanuch, but does not make any reference to a possible meeting with King Mohamed VI.
This is Pedro Sánchez’s fourth official bilateral trip to Morocco. The first visit took place on November 19, 2018, four months after he took office. At that meeting, the head of the Executive was received by King Mohamed VI and by the then Prime Minister, Saadeddine Othmani, and the most striking thing about the visit was the presentation of the proposal to hold a joint football World Cup between Spain, Morocco and Portugal.
Sánchez returned to the country less than a month later, but in this case it was not an official bilateral visit, but rather it occurred as a result of his participation in the United Nations International Conference on Migration in Marrakech. In any case, the President of the Government took the opportunity to hold a bilateral meeting with Othmani focused on cooperation against mafias that traffic in human beings.
Since this trip, we had to wait almost three and a half years for the President of the Government to return to Morocco. The most important point of that period was the very serious bilateral diplomatic crisis that broke out in April 2021 after Spain’s decision to host the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, in a hospital in Logroño, for humanitarian reasons. The Rabat protest resulted in the call for consultations of its ambassador in Madrid, Karima Benyaich, and in a massive assault on Ceuta induced by the Moroccan Government itself.
The big change occurred in March 2022, with the decision of the Spanish Government to accept the Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara as “the most serious and realistic basis” for the solution to the conflict. That “historic turn”, which was rejected by the entire rest of the parliamentary arc, including the government partners, made it possible to overcome the very serious diplomatic crisis with Rabat (and the return of the ambassador) at the price of starting another one with Algeria, the main supplier of gas to Spain. It was also reflected in a growing, and criticized, complicity between Spain and Morocco in matters of human rights.
As a consequence of this “thaw”, Pedro Sánchez made his second bilateral trip to Morocco on April 7 of that same year (the third in total), in which he was received by King Mohamed VI and in which both leaders adopted a bilateral roadmap that laid the foundations for the recovery of diplomatic relations and paved the way for the holding of the High Level Meeting (RAN, by its acronym in Spanish).
The High Level Meeting (the first since 2015), which took place in Rabat at the beginning of February 2023 and represented the climax of the recovery of bilateral relations, began with controversy due to Mohamed VI’s sit-in with Pedro Sánchez (on his third trip bilateral to the country). The Alawite Monarch was outside Morocco, despite the summit, and limited himself to speaking by telephone with Sánchez and inviting him to visit again later.
The bilateral summit concluded with a Joint Declaration in which both parties expressed their desire to “enrich” the “relations of excellence that have always united them” and committed to “avoid everything that we know offends the other party, especially, as it 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 had the participation of the socialist members of the Government and with the absence of the ministers of Unidas Podemos
Pedro Sánchez still returned to Morocco in August 2023 to spend a few days on vacation with your family. Despite being a “strictly private” trip and “paid entirely with its own resources” (according to Moncloa sources), the trip was harshly criticized by the delegate of the Polisario Front in Spain, Abdulah Arabi, by the conservative opposition (PP and Vox) and even by the Government partners, Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU).
Ceuta, Melilla and Algeria
In any case, Sánchez’s trip to Rabat comes at a time of great uncertainty regarding Morocco’s true will to fulfill one of the commitments of the roadmap adopted with Mohamed VI: the opening of land customs with Ceuta and Melilla.
After the break in the general elections on July 23, and once confirmed in his position, José Manuel Albares chose Morocco for his first international trip in the new legislature. In Rabat, the minister conveyed to the Government of Morocco that, on the part of Spain, “everything is ready so that land customs with Ceuta and Melilla can begin to operate” and, therefore, “no more pilot tests are necessary” (in reference to the three pilot tests carried out in January, February and May 2023). However, he was unable to obtain any date for the opening of customs from his Moroccan counterpart, Nasser Bourita, who attributed the delays to “technical problems.”
Albares also addressed in Rabat another of the diplomatic successes of 2023: FIFA’s decision, announced at the beginning of October, to choose the joint candidacy between Spain, Portugal and Morocco to organize the 2030 World Cup.
Sánchez’s trip to Rabat also occurs a few days after Albares’ attempt to travel to Algeria to formally close the diplomatic crisis between the two countries in March 2022. The visit was scheduled for February 12, but was postponed “for reasons of the Algerian agenda” and a new date is awaited.
