Eduardo González
The Government has resorted to irony to answer a question from the Popular Group in Congress about the absence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and seven other members of the Executive in a plenary session of the Lower House whose celebration coincided, exactly, with the last Spain-Portugal Summit.
On March 22nd, the Popular Group presented a battery of questions to the Government on “the reason” for the absence of several ministers from “the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies on March 15th”. Specifically, the questions referred to Albares and the second vice president and minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Diaz; the third vice president and minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera; the Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez; the then Minister of Health, Carolina Darias; the Minister of Education and Vocational Training, Pilar Alegría; the Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta; and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles.
The Government’s answer, published on April 11, was brief: “Your Honors are informed, in relation to the above-mentioned questions, that the Government’s agenda is public and can be consulted at the following link”.
The attached link shows that, that same day, the XXXIV Spanish-Portuguese Summit was held in Jameos del Agua (Lanzarote), attended by seven of the eight ministers cited by the PP, who met with their Portuguese counterparts and signed eleven bilateral agreements on various matters, such as infrastructure, digitization of justice, border schools, higher education, training in social economy, antimicrobial resistance and the development of a cross-cultural program.
The only exception was Margarita Robles, who was not in Lanzarote but took part in the tenth meeting of the Ukrainian Defense Contact Group -known as the ‘Ramstein format’-, convened by the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and attended by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov.
