In this case of reversal of the historic Spanish position on Western Sahara, there are the facts. And there are interpretations.
The facts are as follows. In this perpetual conflict, the Spanish government has just abandoned its traditional active neutrality, which dates back several decades, to adopt the Moroccan position.
Rabat’s proposal to definitively settle this question is the granting of autonomy. It must be said that this is not a generous Spanish-style autonomy with its broad prerogatives. The Alawite regime [la dynastie marocaine régnante] would continue to tightly control the former colony.
This sudden Spanish reversal is important because it risks causing a ripple effect for the other States of the European Union, and also because for the United Nations, Spain remains the administrative power of the territory – Morocco being an administrator in fact – as long as a referendum on self-determination has not taken place.
This Spanish initiative (a letter sent by Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist President of the Spanish government, to the King of Morocco) took everyone by surprise.
Starting with the United Nations, whose spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, has just timidly recalled that the conflict must be resolved within the framework of a political process under the directives of the UN.
And above all, the political class of the Iberian Peninsula, from both left and right, who condemned, for once in unison, Sánchez’s decision to abandon this former Spanish province to the Moroccans for a “second time” (the first time was in 1975, during the Western Sahara partition agreement between Morocco and Mauritania).
Mr. Sánchez’s government allies and his parliamentary supporters have made this known loudly by accusing the executive of having yielded to the “blackmail” of Morocco.
Those are the facts. Now come the interpretations.
What happened for Sánchez, a former defender of the Sahrawi separatists, to undermine a consensual position 46 years old and twist his own party’s program at the risk of alienating his political partners and the Algeria, a “strategic ally”, do we say at the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs?
First, there was the