ABC Editorial: Albares, the worst diplomacy

The last of the fires in Spanish foreign policy has set for the clash of the Minister of Foreign Affairs with the high representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas. The disagreement comes for not supporting Albares the appointment of Belén Martínez, also Spanish and progressive, as numbers two of the European Foreign Service and having tried unsuccessfully that Marcos Alonso, promotional partner and personal friend of the minister. This clash erodes the Spanish influence on European foreign policy and we will pay a price to lose a battle whose objectives only knows albares. Alonso is husband of the ambassador’s substitute in Belgium, which they ceased after falling asleep during an intervention by the minister. Alberto Antón has denounced in a letter a maneuver “clumsy, ridiculous and mean” of the government to discredit his professional prestige. The situation has been so uncomfortable that the ambassador himself has been forced to excuse himself claiming that he was sick and under the effect of medications, and to give other unnecessary explanations after a professional career without Tacha.

The operation has been received among Spanish diplomats with discomfort to establish one more arbitrariness sample of Minister of Sánchez, which in the nap episode appears adorned with an annoying North Korean echo. The cessation adds to other changes that suggest a ministerial purge in the worst possible time. Europe faces the challenge of a commercial war and the international situation needs stability, trust and the assumption of positions with surgical precision.

It is incomprehensible that, in a context in which the great counterweights of geopolitics and the European spirit itself within the transatlantic alliance, news are known as these are questioned. Two other ambassadors have been dismissed in concurrence with such incomprehensible reasons that they have worked a deep discomfort in the legations of Spain abroad and a justified fear of being the object of the Government’s anger. The ambassador to Croatia was ceased for having written an article in support of the King and that of South Korea was fulminated after meeting with the president of the Community of Madrid. The Association of Spanish diplomats itself, which encompasses more than a thousand professionals, has required the minister to apply transparent criteria in appointments instead of arbitrary reasons subject to unintelligible and craving interests. While the appointments of ambassadors are discretionary, the exterior action of a country cannot be subject to friends or phobias or the intention of converting diplomacy into an extension of Sanchismo, which seeks to colonize embassies, like other institutions, in favor of their interests and to the detriment of Spain’s prestige.

It is an unequivocal sign of democratic degradation that governments manage foreign policy to make it another prolongation of its domestic agenda. It shows the latter the inexplicable asymmetry with which Moncloa fuss before the fouls of the Argentine president towards his wife and, on the other hand, maintains the forms before a dictatorship like Maduro’s to safeguard the alleged interests of a country that most They seem to be only yours.

Spanish diplomats know that the international prestige of a power is a beautiful very arduous asset to achieve and very easy to lose. The whims and the authoritarian gesture of Albares do not help in this mission, which affects the national discredit and that will end up paying the image of Spain.