Eduardo González
Yesterday, the Council of Ministers approved the referral to the Cortes Generales (Spanish Parliament) of the Treaty of cooperation in the field of defense between the Kingdom of Spain and the French Republic, while authorizing the expression of Spain’s consent to be bound by the aforementioned Treaty.
This agreement, according to the Council of Ministers, fulfills a double objective: on the one hand, it contributes significantly to strengthening and extending defense cooperation between Spain and France to new areas. On the other hand, it contemplates the new situation of the closest strategic environment, greatly degraded after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and establishes a powerful and renewed commitment to European security and stability in a broad bilateral and multilateral framework in the hands of the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance.
During the twenty-sixth Spanish-French Summit, held in Montauban on March 15, 2021, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, committed to review the content of the Cooperation Agreement in the Defense Area signed by both countries on October 7, 1983.
With this objective, in March 2022, the Minister of Defense of Spain, Margarita Robles, and the then Minister of the French Armed Forces, Florence Parly (who was replaced two months later by the current head, Sébastien Lecornu), agreed in Madrid, during the meeting of the Spanish-French Defense and Security Council, the drafting of a new text that would cover security and defense relations between both countries and that would be formalized in a new Cooperation Agreement. The text was signed in January 2023 in Barcelona, during the bilateral Summit, with prior authorization from the Council of Ministers.
In May of last year, the Council of Ministers sent the Treaty to the Cortes Generales for the first time, but the decision of Pedro Sánchez’s Government to dissolve the two Chambers and call early general elections in July has forced the text to be sent again to the Parliament.
