The president of the European People’s Party (EPP), Manfred Weber, and the head of the Spanish popular delegation in the European Parliament, Dolors Montserrat, accused the European Commission on Wednesday of “campaigning” the government for its forceful position against the project of Andalusian law for the Doñana Park. “I have to be very clear: we see the commissioner wearing a red shirt to campaign for Sánchez and not presenting himself as someone who seeks solutions at this level,” Weber told the press after a meeting between Montserrat and the popular MEP Juan Ignacio Zoido with the European Commissioner for the Environment, Virginijus Sinkevicius.
Weber described as “unacceptable” the “behavior” of this commissioner, who last Monday charged in a meeting with the Junta de Andalucía in Brussels against the irrigation bill in Doñana, which he said goes “in the opposite direction” to the obligation to protect the Natural Park and “could degrade the wetland”.
In an unusual tone in the European political debate, the president of the popular Europeans considered that the European Commission, and particularly the Lithuanian commissioner, is demonstrating “political party behavior” in managing the situation in Doñana and considered that the Executive community must “try to contribute to solutions” and be “a compromise seeker”, for which up to now “it is not helping”.
Following the criticisms of the EPP leader, Commissioner Sinkevicius has responded through a tweet in which he guarantees that the European Commission acts as an “impartial guardian of the [EU] Treaty” and that compliance with the Court’s rulings Europe is a “priority”. In the same message he has sentenced: “Doñana is important for Spain and for the European Union”.
For her part, the popular MEP Dolors Montserrat pointed out that they have asked the commissioner and the European Commission as a whole “that they not be used by any party, in this case by the Socialist Party of Spain, during an electoral campaign like the that we’re having right now.” “We are in the middle of the municipal and regional electoral campaign and therefore (we ask) that they refrain from partisan communications by the Commission during a campaign and that they are not used by any party during an electoral campaign, that they demand the Government to sit with the Board and that they work calmly, with serenity, all the reports from Doñana”, insisted Montserrat.
The popular also made ugly the vice president of the European Commission in charge of the climate portfolio, the social democrat Frans Timmermans, who has not granted them to hold a meeting on the situation of Doñana despite requesting it the same day as the Environment Commissioner. In addition, he stressed that the Commission has told them that the entity that has to enforce the European ruling regarding Doñana must be the Spanish Government and asked the ministry headed by Vice President Teresa Ribera to sit down with the Junta de Andalucía to find a solution. .
Montserrat also assured that “the harsh comments from the European Commission last Monday, when after a meeting with the Junta de Andalucía, a spokesman for the Environment Commissioner pointed out that “the measures adopted so far by Spain to deal with the breaches declared by the Court of Justice (…) are not enough, even without the probable negative impact of the proposed regulation, which seems to go in the opposite direction”.
At that meeting, the European Commission told the Board that “there is strong evidence that intensive agriculture and nearby tourist centers were related to the drying up/reduction of ponds throughout Doñana, which shows that current levels of exploitation of groundwater are unsustainable and require urgent measures to control extractions”.
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