Borrell comes down from the peak of diplomacy from which he tried to make Europe speak the “language of power”

Josep Borrell (La Pobla de Segur, 1947) says goodbye to his position as vice president and High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy with which the Catalan politician has crowned the pinnacle of European diplomacy. In the last five years he has tried, without much success, to get the community club to “speak the language of power”; But he himself recognizes that it is difficult for the EU to be taken into account as a geopolitical power if it is not united and if decision-making takes months due to the need to achieve unanimity.

His departure is more of a goodbye. At 77 years old, Borrell has defined himself as the “last active socialist survivor of the transition” and now recognizes that he has to “live more peacefully.” Minister of Foreign Affairs, President of the European Parliament, temporary candidate for the Presidency of the Government, Minister of Public Works, Secretary of State for the Treasury… In his last political act, a colloquium in a think tankthey gave him a notebook to write his memories, but it probably fell short.

Borrell landed in Brussels (for the second time) in December 2019, appointed by Pedro Sánchez as a Spanish bet for the community government. The Catalan had won the European elections with a better result for the PSOE than what Sánchez himself achieved in the two general elections that were held that same year. Didactic, outspoken and belligerent against the Catalan independence movement, he obtained 33% support. But he did not take the MEP certificate.

Between the elections and his appointment as high representative, he remained Foreign Minister of Sánchez’s first solo government. Their union occurred especially in 2016, when Borrell saw himself reflected in the socialist leader whom the party barons wanted to defenestrate. The Cainite struggles in socialism, which are still the order of the day, had devoured Borrell decades before, when in 1999 he had to renounce the candidacy for the presidency of the Government after having defeated Joaquín Almunia in the first primaries held in the PSOE. .

Borrell then became one of Sánchez’s main squires in his epic return to party leadership. Once in the Government, and with the dependence on ERC, with which the Catalan socialist was involved in clashes, his presence strained the relationship. And that was the time to return to Brussels, as head of diplomacy, a decade after having presided over the European Parliament.

Borrell’s appointment was marred by a fine from the CNMV for using privileged information in the sale of Abengoa shares when he was a director of the company. But the matter quickly went down in history and the socialist entered the quick whirlwind of international politics that has taken him to travel thousands of kilometers.

A spiral in which everything is worse

“He is an absolutely privileged mind, with a privileged memory. Despite his reputation for being choleric, he always listens. He is a brilliant politician and always sees four or five steps ahead of what is happening,” says someone who has worked hand in hand with him.

“I started my mandate five years ago and on the agenda of the Foreign Affairs Council were Russia and Ukraine, the Middle East and the United States,” Borrell recalled at the press conference after the last meeting with the foreign ministers, with whom has met in that format 122 times.

“Five years ago we discussed Russia and Ukraine, not about the war, but about the process within the Normandy format. We talk about the Middle East, not about wars, but about growing tensions with Iran. And we talked about the relationship with the Trump administration and its cooperation or lack of cooperation between the United States administration and the administration of the European Union,” explained the high representative, who presented his mandate as a kind of spiral in the one in which everything has gone worse since the return of the populist Republican leader to the intensification of the trade war with China.

During his mandate, what no one had imagined in recent decades occurred: a war at the gates of the community club with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Borrell has donned pseudo-military clothing several times to travel to kyiv and one of the main measures he has to his credit is having designed a mechanism to provide that country’s army with European weapons, overcoming a barrier that had never occurred before. From there, taboos have been overcome, such as sending tanks, then fighter planes and now the possibility of attacking Russian soil with Allied weapons.

“Europe is in danger”

“Who could have imagined four years ago that we would have North Korean troops on the European border?” Borrell asked in his last political act on Thursday in which he acknowledged that Ukraine had been a “catalyst” for one of the measures of his mandate: the European defense compass. He himself acknowledged that, without that war, it would have gone unnoticed: “Today everyone knows that Europe is in danger.” However, upon leaving, he dared to voice the fear that exists in many capitals and, above all, in kyiv: that Trump will withdraw support and the EU will not be able to assume all the aid to Ukraine. “I don’t think anyone has the answer,” he admitted.

Borrell speaks clearly and that, added to his character, leads him to always make many friends. As he himself acknowledged in that talk, on a visit to Moscow in 2021, the Foreign Minister warned him that if he raised the issue of the opponent Alexei Navalni, he would respond with “repression” of the Catalan independence movement. “That happened,” he said. the still head of diplomacy. “Navalni is dead. That’s what’s important,” he added before ironically commenting on the death of the leader of Wagner’s mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin: “It was a defenestration at 10,000 meters.”

But he has also had clashes at home. His relationship with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has always been tense and, following the massacre in Gaza, it was absolutely exposed. Borrell has been one of the few voices that has criticized the EU’s equidistance with Benjamin Netanyahu and that has most clearly denounced the violation of international and humanitarian law in that massacre.

“How is it possible that we do not see that Netanyahu’s government is trampling on international humanitarian law, that it is systematically violating international humanitarian law?” he lamented before participating in an event on the two-state solution. Borrell gets upset every time he is accused of being an anti-Semite and remembers that he met his first wife in a kibbutz. “Stop hiding in anti-Semitism,” he asked Netanyahu, who used that trick to defend himself from the international arrest warrant that weighs on him and the former Defense Minister.

Clear conscience: “History will judge us all”

He leaves with a clear conscience and warning that rebelling against this decision of international justice reduces the “credibility” of the EU. “History will judge us. “I have done what I believed had to be done,” he said after the last meeting with the foreign ministers in which he tried unsuccessfully to suspend the political dialogue with Israel as a symbolic gesture for the massacre in Palestine. It was the last chance. His successor, Kaja Kallas, has a much less ambitious position on the Middle East and is obsessed with Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps he has more luck when it comes to forging consensus in an area that requires the unanimity of the 27 and, precisely, one of the things that they reproach Borrell for is that on numerous occasions he has spoken as a high representative without the required common position .

“We have to be more united if we want to speak the language of power. If we want to be a geopolitical actor, we have to be more united. More united, closer to our partners and more realistic in our approach to the rest of the world. During these five years I have tried to do everything possible to overcome the blockades and paralysis so that the European Union is able to react as quickly as possible,” is the message that Borrell leaves before retiring. “There are many mountains left to climb,” he said in March in an interview in elDiario.es and what he has already anticipated is that, from now on, he will be able to be even more “frank.”