“I take care of Soria, not Syria.” Legend has it that this was the answer that Mariano Rajoy gave to Felipe González, when the latter, in a private conversation, suggested a greater dedication to foreign policy. It is an answer that fits the character, but there are references to a previous conversation in Madrid in which Syria and Soria already saw each other’s faces.”More Soria and less Syria”, the Minister of Public Administrations Jesús Posada would have warned José María Aznar, when he began to turn to international politics in search of a preferential alliance with the United States.Posada, a native of Soria, son of a leader of the Franco regime who had served as civil governor in various provinces, is a man with his feet on the ground, little given to ideological exaltation, as he demonstrated during the time he held the presidency of the Congress of Deputies. Be that as it may, with so much travel to George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas, Posada saw the 2004 elections in danger and he told Aznar to take care of Soria a little more.
Without a doubt, Pedro Sánchez is from Syria and Alberto Núñez Feijóo is very much from Soria, Ourense and Lugo. The current Prime Minister loves international politics. It’s no secret. He speaks languages ??(English, French and Italian) and was lucky enough to train abroad before dedicating himself to the internal struggle. At the age of 26, he worked as an assistant in the European Parliament and later, between 1997 and 1999, he was part of the cabinet of the UN High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Spanish diplomat Carlos Westerndorp, based in Sarajevo during the last war. balkan. His great vocation is international politics, and the serious problem that he now has to face – the difficult comeback from March 28 – may be due, at least in part, to an excessive imbalance between Syria and Soria.
“Spanish politics is decided in Brussels, Spanish politics is European politics today”, Sánchez used to repeat to his interlocutors a few months ago, while issues such as the Iberian ceiling on gas prices were being negotiated in the European capital, which some took to joke and ended up being an effective mechanism to moderate the increase in electricity rates in the Iberian Peninsula in the most critical months in the gas market. Sánchez was absolutely right in the world: the most substantive aspects of Spanish politics are decided today in Brussels. The last three years document this perfectly.
The pandemic would have sunk the economy of this country –this was the forecast of Pablo Casado and his team– had it not been for the determined German support for the recovery funds agreed in July 2020. The alignment in favor of Ukraine is a European policy –the only possible European policy at the moment–, and there is no important issue that does not pass through Brussels, as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, an Italian nationalist who this week has seen herself confronted with her Polish and Hungarian nationalist friends in the harsh negotiation on immigration policy in the European Union.
Sanchez is clear. The problem is that perhaps he is too clear about it. The current president has not had a Posada by his side these months who told him: “Be a little more Soriano.” The gap between Sánchez and Núñez Feijóo in the field of international politics is so pronounced that the president’s cabinet has fallen into the temptation of overexploiting that vein.
In Spain there is no explicit anti-Europeanism as in other countries of the Union. Even Vox, which has a program openly opposed to the current European Union, tries to hide it a bit, since speaking ill of Europe is still not popular in Spain. Let’s look at the following Eurobarometer data from this past winter: 86% of Spaniards consider themselves European citizens (twelve points above the EU average), but only 45% trust the European Union (two points below the average). ).
The Spaniards want to be European, but they do not trust the policy that is manufactured in Brussels. Perhaps the key – one of the keys – of the current Spanish moment is there: there is no manifest Europhobia, but there is a current of distrust, which has just slapped the Spanish politician who has exhibited the most Europeanism. An almost perfect man in the glamorous photos with former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, who was also hit on the head in March in his country. A tall, elegant guy who leaves the express train fresh as a rose at eight in the morning that has taken him to Kyiv from the Polish border.
The next challenge for this man is to go to Ana Rosa Quintana’s television program, on the Spanish channel of the Berlusconi family. That program, which has never set foot in so far this legislature, is the main distillery of social bad humor in Spain. I think the sketch is clear: Syria, Soria and the television alchemists of Milan, manufacturers of popular consensus in the two largest countries in southern Europe.
In the opposite direction, Alberto Núñez Feijóo receives an upward impulse proportional to the consensus that Ana Rosa and other similar programs dislodge. The media deployment of the Spanish right is currently impressive. The guns of Navarone are yours. Feijóo is Soria squared – since it is in Soria and in 20 other provinces with less than five deputies where the battle is going to be decided – but one day he will have to explain what his ideas about Syria are.
