More than two hours of intervention and not a single minute to respond to the explanations demanded by up to eight political groups about the dismissal of the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, at the request, presumably, of the Moroccan regime. The President of the Government turned a deaf ear to the claims of both the opposition and its allies, determined to squeeze the loudspeaker of Congress to publicize his latest electoral announcement in relation to housing policy and contrast his management with the “black” decade of pp.
PP, Vox, Ciudadanos, PNV, ERC, Coalición Canaria, Bildu, Junts and even Unidas Podemos tried unsuccessfully to get Pedro Sánchez not only to give a detailed account of his high-level contacts with Morocco and his one-man decision to turn the Spain’s traditional position with respect to Western Sahara, but also at least six of them wanted it to deny or confirm, ultimately to explain, the information published by El Confidencial according to which the dismissal of González Laya as head of the Affairs portfolio Foreign Affairs occurred only a week after the Moroccan authorities demanded his departure from the Government on July 2, 2021, coinciding with the crisis between the two countries caused by the attempt to enter Ceuta irregularly by more than 10,000 Moroccans.
Sánchez did everything possible to avoid the questions related to Morocco even though one of the three objectives of his appearance was precisely to inform the Chamber about his foreign policy in relation to the neighbor to the south, and he completely ignored it, despite the insistence of the parliamentary forces, make any comment on the dismissal of González Laya.
According to the data provided by El Confidencial and confirmed by the CNI, in the summer of 2021 a meeting was held in Rabat between the Spanish ambassador in Morocco Ricardo Díez-Hochleitner and his Moroccan counterpart in Spain Karima Benyaich. She, she, claimed the minister’s head as a necessary condition for the recovery of relations between Rabat and Madrid and barely a week later, Sánchez confirmed her departure from the Council of Ministers and replaced her with José Manuel Albares.
The PP spokeswoman, Cuca Gamarra, was the first to raise the matter. In her opinion, that Morocco forced the dismissal of a member of the Government is nothing but an affront to “Spanish sovereignty”. The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, expressed the same opinion, who pressured Sánchez to clarify whether the Rabat regime can indeed “remove and install ministers” in Spain.
Practically the same phrase was heard from the mouth of the EH Bildu deputy, Jon Iñarritu, while the PNV spokesman, Aitor Esteban, assuming that the Prime Minister would not give any explanation, warned that sooner or later we will end up knowing everything that has happened between Morocco and Spain under the mandate of Pedro Sánchez. Neither one nor the other could clarify their doubts because the president. as the nationalist representative denounced, he opted to “get out of it.” Neither did the ERC deputy, Marta Rosique, achieve anything, for whom Rabat is subjecting the Spanish government to permanent “blackmail”.
Also the representative of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, wanted to delve into this issue and her aspirations also fell on deaf ears. The orange leader came to ask in astonishment if Sánchez would be able to close the debate without answering the request that the majority of the parliamentary forces were repeatedly making. Her complaint was confirmed because the President of the Government left the Hemicycle early in the afternoon giving the silent answer.
Sánchez, in fact, reduced his explanations about his policy in relation to Morocco to a minimum. Regarding the reproach, also very repeated, both by the opposition and by its allies, for the ceding of the Sahara to Rabat against Congress and a large part of the Government itself, the president limited himself to assuring that thanks to his policy he has lowered drastically the arrival of irregular immigrants to the peninsula and the Canary Islands and to this he added that up to eleven European countries maintain in relation to the Saharawi question a position very similar to the one he has imposed. He also did not want to refer at any time to the words of his second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, who last Sunday in an interview on La Sexta described the Moroccan regime as a “dictatorship.”
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