Pedro Sánchez has withdrawn troops from Iraq for the second time in almost twenty years. His recent visit to Israel as acting president of the European Union with the aim of proclaiming in public what other European leaders do not want or dare not say about Gaza, has just opened a serious diplomatic crisis of in a way comparable to what the sudden withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq entailed in April 2004, before the stunned gaze of the United States government.
In the electoral campaign, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had promised to withdraw the troops that José María Aznar had sent to Iraq as a sign of support for the American military deployment. One day after taking office, under great pressure due to the strong echo of the recent 11-M attacks, the decision was already made. The effect on public opinion was very strong. The new president kept his word. April 18, 2004. The ZP legend was born.
Ten days after taking the oath of office, with tremendous environmental pressure as a result of the PSOE’s pact with the Catalan independence activists for the promulgation of an amnesty; with a parliamentary majority held by forceps, with the top of the Judiciary on a war footing, with the powerful European People’s Party mobilized in the corridors of Brussels, with a daily demonstration of the extreme right in front of the headquarters of the PSOE, with 11 of the 17 Spanish autonomous communities in the hands of the opposition, with the elites of the State apparatus signing anti-government manifestos, with the King visibly angry at the last official acts, and subjected to an unprecedented media offensive, Sánchez has sung the reed to Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem for the retaliation on Gaza, and has provoked the anger of the state of Israel.
The Spanish president and his companion, the Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo, have been accused by the Israeli foreign minister, Eli Cohen, of “supporting terrorism”. [Liberal De Croo, Belgian prime minister and acting president of the EU from January, reiterated everything he had said yesterday]. Diplomatic crisis like a farmhouse.
Hamas, an Islamist militia that has carried out terrible terrorist actions, yesterday applauded the “courage” of the Spanish president, in announcing the possibility of rapid recognition of the Palestinian State. This recognition is an old promise of the Spanish left, which at some point the Popular Party has approached. As Joaquín Luna recalls today in this newspaper, Mariano Rajoy’s Government threatened to recognize the Palestinian State as retaliation for the open sympathy of the Israeli authorities towards the Catalan independence movement. After the proclamation of the independence of Catalonia on October 27, 2017, Israel was the last of the countries with political weight in the world to express its support for the unity of Spain. It took more than ‘one month to pronounce.
The historical fold is surprising. Spain seems to return many days to 2004. Rodríguez Zapatero and Aznar have returned to the front line of combat (Aznar has never left), the question of Catalonia remains central, and it is becoming more and more obvious than today’s knot began to form twenty years ago. But the world is different. Today’s world is even more dangerous.
Sánchez has seen a path, a narrow, wild path. It needs to get out of the obsessive amnesty framework as soon as possible. During his appearance last Monday to announce the new Government, he did everything he could to minimize the issue. He did not mention the word Catalonia at any time and placed the “reunion agenda” in the eighth point of the new Executive’s priorities. It was clear that he was looking for oxygen and new focuses. Politics is still a constant struggle for the lighting of the stage.
A policy of determination in the face of the serious conflict in Gaza helps shift the focus, widens communication channels with the Arab countries and the Global South, and generates discourse in the face of the European elections in June 2024, in which the Popular Party will try defeat the amnesty Government.
Only Sánchez and a few other leaders can lead this line in Europe. Emmanuel Macron cannot do it, with a latent civil conflict in France. Even less Germany, in perpetual debt to the Jewish people. Nor Giorgia Meloni, distant heir to a fascism that in the 1930s passed racial persecution laws in Italy. Nor the countries of Eastern Europe. Only Spain, which did not participate directly in the Second World War and experienced the Holocaust from afar, can stand out in its criticism of the Netanyahu Government. From Brussels, Josep Borrell has already gone in this direction.
It does not seem that Sánchez has consulted his move with the US Secretary of State, which supports Israel, but at the same time is interested in the appeasement and in a strengthened role for the Palestinian National Authority. Pro-Palestinian sympathies are growing in the US Democratic Party.
Sánchez has put himself at the head of a strong current of opinion, the majority in Spain. These days it invades Sumar’s space and redraws the battlefield (the PSOE is not suffering a dip in the polls as a result of the amnesty, it is the PP that is momentarily growing at the expense of Vox), but Israel remembers, always remembers, and maintains a high level of influence in Morocco, despite Gaza.
