Reading a letter sent by Morocco to the UN Human Rights Council has made it possible to confirm what was already imagined: that Moroccan king Mohammed VI ensnared Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and the new relationship between the two countries is identical to what it has always been: the North African country calls the shots and you don't like it, they open up the borders for immigrants to come in until you have no other remedy than to give in to the blackmail. The decision to hand over the Sahrawi people to Morocco, denying their right to self-determination, was a suicidal move. It took Spain away from an historical commitment and, as was immediately seen, from countries like Algeria. And it did not take place at any old time, but rather, exactly as the rise in energy prices began to be clearly visible and, far from helping to make the Algerian pipeline available at a more than reasonable price, it ended up benefiting Italy, which found itself with a greater supply than it had before and at a lower price than ours. Since then we have not lacked gas, but we have paid the United States for it at a higher price.
Pedro Sánchez, who has not yet explained the reasons for that sudden about-turn, put all of us in a bind. Not to mention how he condemned an entire people with whom there was a commitment that transcended his leadership of the executive. At that point he said solemnly that it was the start of a new period in relations between Spain and Morocco, no specifics of which have ever been spelt out, no matter how officially it was presented as a new era for the two countries. "The kingdom of Morocco has no terrestrial borders with Spain, and Melilla is still a prison under occupation," says the letter sent to the UN, which reproduces the language of laying its claim to Ceuta and Melilla that Morocco has always backed. No change here.
The fact that Pedro Sánchez has come out stating that "Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish, full stop," means practically nothing, because, as some analysts predicted at the time, with the agreement last April between Spain and Morocco, entitled "New phase of partnership between Spain and Morocco," presented as a joint statement, only Mohammed VI was strengthened, because his political strategy is to gain positions, not to consolidate a deep relationship. When Morocco presses the button, which will be when the United States is in debt to Mohammed VI for his role in the Middle East conflict, Ceuta and Melilla will fall from the Moroccan side and Spain won't be able to do anything apart from gesture, even if, in this skill, Sánchez is a true artist.
There is, therefore, no winning Spanish foreign policy being deployed in Morocco, nor is there in any important conflict, where the Spanish voice is becoming smaller. Another example would be how Germany has excluded Spain from the European anti-missile shield. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has left Pedro Sánchez outside a project to which fifteen countries have already been added in the face of Spanish irritation. The Spanish defence minister, Margarita Robles, stated only that Germany was moving ahead with the project unilaterally. This, at a time when French president Emmanuel Macron has spoken for the first time since Ukraine's Russia invasion - and alarmingly - of a World War, noting in a tweet that "we do not want a World War". Warlike language and the Russian military escalation do nothing but fuel fear in a context in which the problems continue to grow. We have gone like this for many months since February, and there is no week when the general outlook is not bleaker than the previous month.