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Legend has it that Mariano Rajoy declared himself more interested in Soria than in Syria. After all, voters live here and foreign policy has helped more to lose elections than to win them. Alberto Núñez Feijóo had not cultivated international relations either, but that changed some time ago and as leader of the PP he has already maintained more contacts with foreign journalists than Rajoy throughout his presidency. Feijóo has summoned foreign media correspondents based in Madrid at least four times, the last time to alert them of the risks of Pedro Sánchez’s pacts with the independentists. Why this interest?
One of the guests at those meetings describes the evolution he has perceived in the leader of the PP. He explains that the first time he showed up fearfully, reading every answer on his papers. But just before the general elections, Feijóo was another. He seemed loose, sure of himself. After 23-J, this journalist noticed that he was somewhere between sad and irritated: “he repeated two hundred times that he had won the elections.” And last week, when he gathered them under a banner with the motto “helpSpain”, he did so again confidently and with a battery of arguments against Pedro Sánchez. The PP, which in 2017 was not able to gauge the relevance of European public opinion in the Catalan conflict, is now clear that some domestic political battles are also won in Brussels.
The European Parliament yesterday debated the “threat” that the amnesty law may pose to the rule of law in Spain, based on an initiative supported by the European People’s Party, the Liberals (including Ciudadanos and the PNV) and the group of Europeans and Reformists (of which Vox is a part). “Listen to Europe,” the popular Dolors Montserrat repeated ad nauseam. “Europe listens to the clamor of the streets of Spain…”, he proclaimed from the blue tribune, in a version of Joan Maragall’s “Escolta Espanya”, written in 1898 after the loss of Cuba, which begins with a denunciation of the centralist incomprehension against to Catalanism.
MEP Carles Puigdemont smiled from his seat, delighted that the international focus was finally back on the Catalan conflict. For many months since he arrived in this chamber, the former president insisted on the matter in each intervention, but in recent times he had stopped doing so due to the lack of interest it aroused among his fellow deputies. But the negotiation for Sánchez’s investiture has given him back political prominence and the PP has amplified it with his demonstrations and now at the international level.
The Popular Party has taken the amnesty law to the European Parliament, although at the moment they have not said whether it will be submitted to the EU courts once the Constitutional Court has ruled in Spain. They are looking for European pronouncements against the law, something that would lead to a scolding of the Spanish Government that would erode Sánchez’s reputation. Nothing to do with that October 2017, when popular (Esteban González Pons) and socialists (Ramón Jáuregui and Iratxe García), together with the Liberals (Javier Nart) and the Greens (Ernest Urtasun), allied themselves to prevent the EU from giving hopes for the Catalan independence movement. Rajoy’s absolute negligence on that front put the European Commission on the brink of a statement that perhaps would have changed the course of history. It was PP MEP González Pons who realized the risk and pulled all the strings, including contacts with his socialist colleagues, to stop it. And González Pons is now one of Feijóo’s main squires, undoubtedly advising him on the need not to neglect relations with Europe.
On the afternoon of October 1, several European politicians began to speak out about police charges in very compromising terms for Rajoy. Already in the evening, González Pons received a call from today’s Manfred Weber, president of the EPP, who told him that it was impossible to prevent the issue from being addressed in the plenary session of the European Parliament scheduled for October 4. Pons immediately communicated this to Rajoy and, from then on, everything was a rush. The PP mobilized through the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, founder of Forza Italia, to try to keep the debate from getting out of hand. But, pending this front, the surprise came from the side of the European Commission.
The president of that institution, Jean-Claude Juncker, was stuck on a plane, incommunicado, and had left a speech for his vice president Frans Timmermans to read. It suggested European mediation. The MEPs of the PP and the PSOE pressured him to delete that reference and, after much persistence, they succeeded. Rajoy’s Government mobilized with the foreign ministries of other countries, especially Denmark, the Baltic republics and Slovenia. An agreement was also reached with London whereby, in exchange for its support for Catalonia, Spain undertook to veto Scotland’s eventual entry into the EU.
Puigdemont tried to explore the route of international mediation until the last minute. In the plenary session of the Parliament on October 10, when he declared unilateral independence and left it on hold, those around him let it slip that it was because he had received a call (which had not occurred) to that effect from the Polish Donald Tusk, president of the European Council and now head of Government in Poland. Today he has achieved international mediation, but between two parties, the PSOE and Junts, not between two governments, the Spanish and the Catalan, as was proposed then.
The “internationalization of the Catalan conflict” has always been an objective of the independence movement, while the Spanish government is supposed to have its political, diplomatic and media contacts to convince of its position. For a long time, Catalan independentists did sustained work in this regard, but they did not achieve the desired recognition, despite the apathy of Rajoy’s Executive. It is possible that the current PP does not want the same thing to happen to it, but rather it seems that it has decided to “internationalize the Spanish conflict.”