<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, discussed this Monday the future Foreign Action Strategy with the spokespersons of the parliamentary groups of the Foreign Affairs Committees of Congress and the Senate.</strong></h4> “Within the framework of the elaboration of the new Foreign Action Strategy, I have met with spokespersons of the Foreign Affairs Committees of Congress and the Senate to listen to their contributions,” declared the minister through social networks. “Foreign policy is a State policy,” he added. The meeting took place at the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, in Madrid. According to sources familiar with the meeting, the meeting raised the issues that the strategy must address, such as multilateralism, security, strategic autonomy and Spain's influence in the world "within the new and complex international context." On January 13, José Manuel Albares announced during the inauguration of the IX Conference of Ambassadors, attended by the 130 Spanish ambassadors accredited around the world, that his Department will present the new Foreign Action Strategy in 2025, which will be "accompanied by a new design and deployment of our network abroad." At the moment there is no date for the adoption of the new Strategy. The previous Foreign Action Strategy (2021-2024) was approved by the Council of Ministers in April 2021, when Arancha González Laya was still minister and just three months after José Manuel Albares took office. That text was the result of a long process that included consultations with ministerial departments, constitutional bodies, autonomous communities and autonomous cities and local entities through the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, among other interlocutors. In January 2021, the text was sent to the Cortes Generales (Spanish Parliament) for its knowledge and debate, which resulted in González Laya appearing before the Foreign Affairs Committees of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, in debates clearly marked by political polarization and the bad atmosphere created by the interference of the then second vice president of the Government, Pablo Iglesias, in the foreign policy of the Government. The next step, before its adoption by the Council of Ministers, was the favorable report of the Foreign Policy Council, chaired by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. That text - whose objective was to ensure that Spain stopped being a "spectator" in foreign policy and became a "nodal country" capable of forging agreements and providing responses to current problems - differed from the previous (and first) Foreign Action Strategy, approved in 2015, in that it included an economic report. The 2015 report was limited to making a reference to the Ministry's budget for the 2014 financial year.
