Morocco has been the common denominator of some of the great crises of the coalition government. Pedro Sánchez's swerve, which in March 2022 turned Spain's historical position with the Sahara by 180 degrees, generated significant friction and wear and tear between the PSOE, Unidas Podemos and their parliamentary allies. Also the controversy over the Pegasus case, with a harsh parliamentary offensive by the opposition. The neighboring country seemed a kind of taboo subject depending on the context. Especially now, in full negotiations for the investiture, but the acting president of the Executive took a new turn on Tuesday and appeared in Marrakech to spend his vacation.

The Moroccan official press also puffs up the fact that the President of the Government of Spain has chosen his country for his summer vacations. The first to break the news was Rue 20, a newspaper related to the security apparatus, and hours later all the press picked it up.. La Moncloa took hours to confirm the news of Rue 20. When he did, he turned to the EFE Agency to give his version, before answering El Confidencial, which had asked him the question..

Since Sánchez's appearance before the PSOE leadership, last Monday, to analyze the result of 23-J, it was assumed that he had settled in La Mareta, one of the official residences that he has the right to use, in Lanzarote. La Moncloa was silent until this Tuesday, when he denied that he had started his vacation and revealed that he has spent all this time in Madrid. His team had not clarified the details of these days of rest, much less his intention to spend a few days in Morocco.. They also did not want to confirm, for “security reasons”, that, as indicated by the Moroccan newspaper Kech 24, their stay will end in Tetouan, in the north of the country, very close to where Mohamed VI spends the summer..

Since 2012, no Spanish head of government had spent their summer vacation abroad, as indicated by the EFE Agency. Only Aznar and his family spent part of their Christmas vacation in Jerusalem in 1999.. The Moroccan authorities are very hospitable to first-rate politicians, as high-ranking officials and French deputies who have assiduously frequented that country well know.. In this case, Moncloa sources have specified that the expenses are fully borne by them. They also traveled on a regular flight.

symbolic message

With his family trip to Marrakech, Sánchez boasts of his relationship with Morocco, which has earned him so much criticism from the right-wing opposition and arouses so much suspicion in his partners to the left of the PSOE, starting with Sumar, Podemos or IU, Solidarity with the Saharawi cause. All this, just over two weeks before the constitutive session of the Cortes Generales, scheduled for August 17, and with the negotiations on the presidency of Congress and his investiture underway..

The turn with the Sahara, which the head of the Executive recognized and then began to deny, while pointing out the decrease in irregular immigration, led the already former second vice president Pablo Iglesias to affirm that “there is nothing more imprudent than trusting” Sánchez. His successor as vice-president, Yolanda Díaz, then maintained that the PSOE was acting “incoherently” and “opaquely”.. In April of this year, she added that Morocco is a “dictatorship”, and that, if she became president, she would “return to the previous position of Spain with the Sahara”..

Díaz, whose number three in Congress is the Saharawi activist Tesh Sidi, and his number two is the last Spanish ambassador to the UN, Agustín Santos Maraver, places him in a difficult position.. Partners such as ERC, EH Bildu or the BNG demanded that Sánchez reverse this swerve. And, at the summit of the Executive in Morocco, in February of this year, Esquerra and Bildu made ugly their “betrayals” of the Sahara, but also that their support for Rabat has generated “several problems for Spain”.

The parties that managed to park scandals such as espionage with the Pegasus software have not stopped reproaching him for this historical turn, difficult to understand even for grassroots socialist voters. And to this is added the tragedy that occurred at the Melilla fence in June 2022, when 37 migrants (according to Amnesty International) lost their lives at the hands of the Moroccan police when trying to enter Spain.. A chapter that has persecuted the Government, has politically burned the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and that the UN Committee against Torture has asked to investigate.

without compensation

Deep down, Sánchez does not have many reasons to be satisfied with the relationship established with Morocco as of March 2022, when he sent the letter to Mohamed VI, aligning himself with the solution that Rabat has been advocating since 2007 to resolve the Sahara conflict. Occidental: an autonomy plan that would circumvent the self-determination referendum of the Sahrawis.

With this letter, the president put an end to a long bilateral crisis unleashed by the Moroccan authorities on December 10, 2020, long before the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, was received in La Rioja to be cured of covid-19.. Hostilities began just as President Donald Trump recognized Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara.

In exchange for this swerve in Spanish foreign policy, the president has obtained few counterparts. The main one, which he himself announced on April 7 at the end of an iftar (Ramadan dinner) with Mohamed VI, has not been fulfilled.. The president then assured that the commercial customs of Melilla with Morocco, closed unilaterally by Rabat five years ago today, would be reopened, and one would be inaugurated in Ceuta. Spaniards who cross into Morocco through these borders are also subjected to degrading treatment by Moroccan agents, who do not apply the so-called traveler regime, which allows them to carry gifts for a small amount.

Nor have there been any advances in the talks to delimit the waters on the Atlantic coast, between the Canary Islands and Morocco, or to improve the coordination of the Western Sahara airspace, which is managed —with the exception of military flights— from the tower of Las Palmas airport control. Rabat wants the Spanish government to transfer control of that airspace to it.

Until now, the main success of the reconciliation with Morocco was the drop in irregular immigration by sea to Spain, especially that which reached the Canary Islands.. In recent weeks, there has been a change in trend and the arrival of people without papers is on the rise, although it is not always the responsibility of the neighboring country. More canoes also leave Senegal for the Canary Islands.

In the first seven months of this year, 15,603 irregular immigrants have landed on the Spanish coast, 4% more than during the same period last year, according to the website of the Ministry of the Interior, whose information is deliberately opaque to make it difficult to analyze migratory flows. 32% more arrived on the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands and on the Canary Islands, 11.3% less. Immigration by land to Ceuta and Melilla also decreased.