The Treaty of Friendship with France faces another obstacle this week from the PP in the Senate

Eduardo González The Senate will vote again this week on the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Spain and France, just three weeks after its approval in the Congress of Deputies, again with the People's Party and Vox voting against it. Specifically, the plenary session of the Upper House will address this Thursday a request to the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of Article 2, paragraph 4, of the Treaty and will then vote on the text itself. This is the PP's second constitutional challenge against the Treaty. The first took place in February 2025 and was supported by the Senate plenary session at the initiative of the party led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Under these circumstances, the text was rejected by Congress on May 15, 2025, and in December 2025, the Constitutional Court opted not to rule on the appeal, considering that the parliamentary "no" vote prevented the text's validation. The People's Party's (PP) opposition to the Treaty is related to the controversial Article 2.4, which stipulates that "a member of the Government of one of the Parties shall be invited to the Council of Ministers of the other Party at least once every three months on a rotating basis." According to Feijóo's party, this clause is incompatible with the Constitution. Therefore, in an attempt to salvage the Treaty, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and his French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, agreed, through letters exchanged on April 6 and 10, 2026, on “the interpretation of Article 2.4 of the Treaty,” which establishes that the invitation to members of the other party will not be to participate in the Council of Ministers, but rather to “participate on the sidelines of said Council of Ministers in a separate meeting.” Just two weeks after the interpretative agreement between the two countries, the Council of Ministers resubmitted the agreement to the Spanish Parliament (Cortes Generales) under the urgent procedure and authorized Spain’s expression of consent to be bound by the Treaty, thus allowing the parliamentary proceedings currently underway to resume. Under these new circumstances, the Treaty was approved in mid-June by the Congress with 175 votes in favor, 170 against, and one abstention. Once this step is completed (which occurred a week after its approval in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lower House, with a similar proportion of votes), the Treaty will go to the Senate. If it is rejected in the Upper House, which is highly likely given that the People's Party holds an absolute majority, the text will return to the Congress for a final vote, in which, unlike the previous one, an absolute majority (176 votes) will be required. Therefore, the final approval of the text will depend on the Government having the support of all its parliamentary partners. The first rejection of the Treaty in the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies (May 15, 2025) was due to the votes against it by the People's Party and the abstentions of Junts and Podemos. The Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the Kingdom of Spain and the French Republic was signed on January 19, 2023, in Barcelona by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, during the 27th Spanish-French Bilateral Summit. This is the first agreement of its kind between the two countries and elevates bilateral relations to the highest possible level, comparable to the relationship Spain has enjoyed with Portugal since the Trujillo Summit in October 2021. France has already ratified the text, but Spain has not yet been able to do so. Albares In statements to the TVE program 'La hora de La 1', Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares noted this Monday, July 6, that the text has already been approved by Congress and, “therefore, the Senate should have no further problem ratifying it definitively.” “We are talking about the first treaty of friendship and cooperation we have with our main neighbor and our main trading partner in the world, the main destination for our exports and one of the largest investors in Spain,” he reminded viewers. “Therefore, it is imperative, to protect our exports, to protect those investments and those jobs, to advance Europe and European values, to provide security to all those cross-border municipalities that depend on tourism, trade, and the movement of people across the border, that this treaty be ratified,” he warned. According to Albares, “the People's Party is playing a very dangerous game and turning its back on the 300,000 Spaniards who live in France, the million Spaniards who live in cross-border areas, and the million Spaniards employed by French companies.” He denounced the PP, saying it is “trying to obstruct and delay this decision and has already introduced a debate on a constitutional challenge to the treaty, scheduled for next Thursday, the 9th.” “It's absurd; everyone knows that a treaty of friendship and cooperation with France is absolutely not unconstitutional, it's very necessary, and it protects Spaniards and their interests,” he warned. “What they want is to continue delaying and stalling from a position that has no sense of statesmanship or national foreign policy,” he denounced. “Clearly, this demonstrates that the People's Party is completely incapable of governing and has no sense of statesmanship whatsoever,” he insisted.

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