Moroccan Sahara: Spanish Parliament Confirms Government’s Position, Preeminence of Autonomy Plan

Spain’s Congress of Deputies, the lower house of Parliament, confirmed, Thursday evening, the position of the government of Pedro Sanchez on the Moroccan Sahara issue, thus confirming the broad support for Morocco’s autonomy proposal within the Spanish constitutional institutions and the main political formations. By rejecting by a very large majority (252 out of 333 votes) “a draft resolution” asking the Spanish government to review its position on the Moroccan Sahara, the Spanish Parliament supports, clearly and decisively, the approach taken by the President of the Government, Pedro Sanchez, who stressed last March in a message to HM King Mohammed VI that his country “considers the Moroccan autonomy initiative as the most serious, realistic and credible basis for resolving the dispute” over the Moroccan Sahara. The vote establishes a clear and unambiguous observation: the two main political formations in Spain representing the majority (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party-PSOE) and the opposition (Popular Party-PP) voted against the text of the resolution. Only the deputies who are behind this resolution and who are used to chasing chimeras approved it. Extreme formations with little impact on political life, such as the Catalan Republican Left and the pro-independent Basque formation of Bildu voted in favor of the text. This new slap in the face to the separatists’ supporters has once again put things in their right place and strengthened the position of the Spanish government, which had recognized, in the message addressed to His Majesty the King, ”the importance of the Sahara issue for Morocco,” while emphasizing the Kingdom’s “serious and credible efforts within the framework of the United Nations to find a mutually acceptable solution” to the dispute. The position adopted by the Spanish Congress of Deputies enshrines support for Morocco’s full sovereignty over its southern provinces and for its serious efforts to resolve the dispute over the Moroccan Sahara. This new debacle has definitively confirmed the bankruptcy of the theses supported by the separatists, which are echoed by a tiny minority pursuing spurious electoral interests, thus dashing the hopes of the separatists and their few supporters. The text is a further blow to the increasingly isolated polisario separatists, who are in a catatonic and desperate state in Spain. Despite the low maneuvers and indecent acts of the polisario and Algeria, the Spanish government has not stopped defending the relevance and the validity of its decision regarding the Moroccan Sahara, which is the result of a “reflection and evaluation of the whole situation.” The statements and the unambiguous positions of Spanish officials in favor of the Moroccanness of the Sahara only further confuse the separatists, who see support for them in Spain dwindle daily. At the same time, the autonomy initiative under Morocco’s sovereignty has emerged as the one and only solution to this regional dispute.