Zoido and González Pons warned the CDU of the "political use" of the visit of German deputies to Doñana

There will be no visit by German deputies to Doñana for the moment. The trip organized by a delegation of parliamentarians to Spain whose purpose was to find out how climate change and water resources in agriculture are managed from Andalusia has been abruptly interrupted to prevent it from becoming a throwing weapon on the eve of general elections in Spain.

The embassy in Spain informed this morning of the suspension of the expedition when the parliamentarians were already meeting at the Ministry for Ecological Transition with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, in what was to be the first stop of their visit .

Subsequently, they intended to go to several Andalusian provinces, including Huelva or Almería, to find out how irrigation water is rationalized in a context of drought.. But what had ignited the controversy and the alarms of the Junta de Andalucía is the visit they had planned to Doñana, in the midst of a strong controversy over the campaign that calls for a boycott against the red fruits of the National Park environment.

The Andalusian Government had understood the trip of the parliamentarians of the Bundestag as one more of those that take place at the end of the year in the institutions to learn about specific aspects of the management of countries with shared interests. But, at the same time, he feared that the central government would turn it into a kind of external audit regarding the management that the Board carries out in Doñana and its controversial bill for the expansion of irrigation in the Condado region.

In this regard, the Government of Spain has not hesitated to echo the risks that a legalization of new irrigation could entail for the water reserves of Doñana in its communications addressed to the authorities and the countries of the European Union, despite the fact that, At the moment, nothing has been approved since, even if the initiative goes ahead, it will not have any medium-term effect on the situation of the Doñana aquifer. The text expressly prohibits the capture of underground resources and conditions the risks to the availability of surface water from transfers.

However, the Board has also criticized the fact that both Minister Teresa Ribera and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, echoed last week the boycott campaign launched in Germany by a consumer platform against Huelva strawberries.

For all this, the Popular Party had contacted its MEPs to alert German parliamentarians of the risk of “instrumentalization” of their visit on the eve of an electoral campaign. Both Juan Ignacio Zoido and Esteban González Pons addressed the deputies of the German CDU to warn them of the partisan use that was being made of the visit, and to warn them that it could be interpreted as “political interference” in the midst of the electoral campaign.

In view of this background, the delegation of the Commission for the Environment, Nature Protection, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection of the German Bundestag (Parliament) informed, through the German ambassador in Spain, of its decision to « give up for the moment his long-planned trip to Andalusia». Although he also clarified that his intention was strictly “to exchange technical information on a topic that interests” both countries, such as climate change and its consequences.

The Board immediately applauded the suspension. Its Minister of Sustainability and the Environment, Ramón Fernández-Pacheco, affirmed that the German deputies had shown “more institutional loyalty and common sense” than the Government of Spain.