Feijóo pledges to Marco Rubio to make Spain “a reliable partner”

Eduardo González The president of the People's Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has once again distanced himself from Pedro Sánchez's government regarding the foreign policy of US President Donald Trump, this time through a telephone conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to whom he pledged to make Spain “a reliable partner for our allies.” “Yesterday afternoon I had a fruitful conversation with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio,” the PP leader wrote Tuesday in a message posted on Twitter. “We discussed bilateral relations between our countries, NATO, Latin America, and Ukraine, among many other issues,” he continued. “My commitment: that Spain be a reliable partner for our allies,” he added. This is not the first time that the leader of the PP has addressed the leaders of the United States making commitments more typical of a Prime Minister than a leader of the opposition, and, in doing so, marking positions and distances with respect to Pedro Sánchez regarding the relationship with Washington. In November 2024, Feijóo expressed his “sincere congratulations to Donald Trump” on his victory in the US presidential elections and pledged to work “for a better bilateral relationship, with the EU and within NATO.” The PP leader again congratulated Trump on January 20, 2025, “on the day of his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States.” “Many challenges lie ahead for cooperation with Spain, with the EU, within NATO, and on matters of international policy.” “I believe in the importance of the transatlantic relationship,” he added via social media. Following the last NATO Summit, held in The Hague in June 2025, where Sánchez rejected attempts by the US and the Alliance to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo accused the Prime Minister of having become “an international problem for Europe, for NATO, for the allies, for the partners, and for Western democracies.” Likewise, last October, after Donald Trump proposed Spain's expulsion from NATO for this reason (a path not foreseen by the Alliance Treaty itself), the leader of the People's Party (PP) wrote on social media that “the problem is not Spain. Spain is a credible, proud, and committed partner of NATO. And we will continue to be. The problem is Sánchez.” In another demonstration of his alignment with Trump’s foreign policy and his disagreements with Pedro Sánchez on this matter, last January Alberto Núñez Feijóo described the US intervention in Venezuela as “historic” and accused the Spanish government of having “abandoned its diplomatic resources and moral leadership to confront Maduro’s tyranny,” to whom, “on the contrary, it has given time and excuses.” “What happened in the early hours of January 3, 2026, in Venezuela, with the US intervention and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, defies any other description,” the PP leader declared in a statement.

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