<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>On March 14, 2020, exactly five years ago, the Government declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the beginning of a nightmare that hit Spain particularly hard, forcing the European Union to rethink its own operations and address recovery. It led to the closure of its borders and the immediate repatriation of more than 8,500 Spaniards through the network of embassies and consulates.</strong></h4> On January 31, the first case was detected in Spain, involving a German national who was in La Gomera. Just two weeks later, authorities were forced to cancel the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a COVID-19 pandemic. By then, Spain had already become one of the countries hardest hit by the disease in the world, both in terms of infections and deaths. On March 13, Javier Solana, former Secretary General of NATO, former High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy of the EU, and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, was hospitalized with coronavirus. On March 14, the President of the Government Pedro Sánchez declared a state of emergency and the start of a quarantine (confinement of the population and a ban on going out) that would last until June. That same day, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska announced the closure of Spanish borders starting March 16, allowing entry only to Spanish citizens or other persons due to force majeure. The restrictions would not affect the transport of goods or diplomatic personnel. On March 17, border controls within the Schengen area and the closure of the EU's external borders came into effect. <h5><strong>Repatriations</strong></h5> Under these circumstances, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was forced to assist more than 26,000 Spaniards who were abroad at the time the state of emergency was declared, as well as to charter fifty flights to directly repatriate more than 8,500 Spaniards, in collaboration with the network of Embassies and Consulates. Both in terms of volume and the period in which COVID-19 restrictions were in place, Latin America was among the regions in the world with the largest number of Spaniards at the time the crisis broke out, and therefore, it was the region to which the Ministry dedicated the largest deployment of repatriation flights: a total of 32. In total, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs contracted air transport services worth €3.3 million to repatriate Spaniards caught unaware by the border closures. <h5><strong>Problems with Turkey and Israel</strong></h5> The fight against the pandemic also affected bilateral diplomatic relations. On April 4, Turkish authorities seized hundreds of ventilators for coronavirus patients in their country that had been purchased directly from China by several Spanish autonomous communities, as confirmed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya. Following diplomatic efforts by the government, the Turkish authorities finally realized that Spain needed these ventilators more than Turkey, but not without the Turkish Embassy in Madrid defending itself against accusations of "confiscation." In the middle of the same month, Israel also seized around thirty ventilators destined for Spain, forcing González Laya to demand that her Israeli counterpart release this material, arguing that it had been acquired before Israel banned the export of critical equipment for severe COVID-19 cases. <h5><strong>De-escalation and Border Opening</strong></h5> On April 28, Pedro Sánchez presented the four-phased lockdown "de-escalation" plan, and on June 21, the government declared the end of the state of emergency after 98 days. At that point, more than 28,000 people had already died in Spain. On June 5, Pedro Sánchez asked the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, to ask the European Union to establish a series of common criteria for lifting border restrictions. It was not until July that temporary restrictions on non-essential travel from countries in the Schengen area and the European Union, including the internal borders with Portugal, began to be lifted. As a result of COVID-19, the number of foreign visitors to our country plummeted. Since June 21, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began authorizing entry to British citizens and citizens from European Union countries without the need for quarantine. Despite these desperate attempts to save the tourist season, summer figures showed a 75% drop compared to the previous year. Once the summer was over, the German and British governments lifted travel restrictions to the Canary Islands in October due to the low incidence of coronavirus infections. In September, King Felipe VI spoke remotely at the High-Level Meeting to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, within the framework of a UN General Assembly particularly marked by both the anniversary and the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. <h5><strong>Vaccine diplomacy</strong></h5> Since the end of 2020, the EU began authorizing the first COVID-19 vaccines, and on December 27, the first vaccination campaign began in Spain and the European Union. Three days earlier, Spain had seen 1,854,951 positive cases and 49,824 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Around the same time, the EU structured a common program for the distribution among Member States of vaccines from European advance purchases, which would be divided based on each country's population. Under this criterion, Spain would receive 10 percent of the total estimated 800 million immunization units, equivalent to 140 million doses to vaccinate 80 million people. Under these circumstances, the Spanish government launched what is known as "health or vaccine diplomacy," with the aim of delivering millions of COVID-19 vaccines to less-developed countries using the surplus quantities Spain received through the EU. <h5><strong>Recovery and Mobility: Spain and the EU</strong></h5> Following the gradual approval and implementation of vaccines, the main European debates revolved around economic recovery and the restoration of mobility, two issues in which Spain played a prominent role. Regarding recovery, a heated debate arose within the EU between southern European countries, especially Spain and Italy (the hardest hit by the first wave of the pandemic), which called for the issuance of joint debt at the EU level and for the recovery fund to include both non-repayable transfers and loans, and the so-called "frugal countries" (clearly led by the Netherlands), who opposed joint debt and were more in favor of loans over transfers. Finally, in July 2020, the European Council approved the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)—endorsed by the European Parliament in February 2021—provided with €672.5 billion in grants and loans to curb the effects of the pandemic and which constituted the most important pillar of the Next Generation EU stimulus package. The approval of the RRF represented a fundamental step for the economic prospects of Pedro Sánchez's government following the COVID-19 crisis, as both the Executive's Recovery Plan and the General State Budget (PGE) depended on the €71.6 billion allocated to Spain through Next Generation EU transfers. In June 2021, the European Commission approved the Spanish government's Recovery Plan, and in November, Spain became the first EU country to request the first payment from the Recovery Fund from Brussels. Regarding mobility, the Sánchez government immediately expressed its support for Greece's proposal for the creation of a European vaccination certificate, which, it asserted, was "very aligned" with the international mobility strategy presented by Sánchez to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in mid-December 2020. In March, the Commission proposed the creation of a green digital certificate that would prove that a person had been vaccinated against COVID-19, had recovered from the virus, or had tested negative. The Spanish government immediately expressed its "strong support" for the green digital certificate, an initiative openly endorsed by southern European countries most dependent on tourism, such as Spain, Italy, Malta, Cyprus, and Portugal, but not favorably received by countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Finally, EU member states agreed on the technical specifications of the certificate in April, which came into force on July 1 following its approval by the European Parliament. Separately, in May, the permanent representatives of the 27 EU Member States approved a European Commission proposal to reopen the Union's external borders to travelers from third countries who had been immunized against COVID-19 with vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or the World Health Organization (WHO). Thanks to vaccination campaigns, which allowed for the elimination of almost all restrictions and the reopening of borders in most countries, COVID-19 ceased to be a central focus of Spanish and international politics in 2022. The pandemic was still wreaking havoc through its latest variant, the less aggressive but more contagious Omicron, but the first analyses of this new variant confirmed that vaccines were making a difference. However, the tragedy of COVID-19 was almost immediately replaced by another tragedy: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which abruptly changed all major international priorities. From then on, the same European unity that had helped combat the pandemic had to be activated to impose sanctions on Russia, provide military and financial aid to Ukraine, welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees, reconfigure the EU's energy framework, and, following Donald Trump's arrival in the White House and the subsequent change of course by the United States, strengthen the defense and security of the EU as a whole and of individual states.
