Always under a phenomenal political storm in Spain – now due to the lurid Tito Berni scandal, the lack of agreement with Podemos to correct the law of only yes is yes at the gates of another divided 8-M, or the new motion of censure promoted by the extreme right of Vox–, Pedro Sánchez begins his second preparatory express tour this Thursday for the Spanish rotating presidency of the EU, which will start on July 1.
After a first trip with stops in Vienna (Austria), Zagreb (Croatia) and Ljubljana (Slovenia) in mid-February, the President of the Government will now compact, also in just a day and a half, visits to Dublin (Ireland) and Copenhagen ( Denmark), this Thursday, and Helsinki (Finland) tomorrow Friday. And at Moncloa they are already preparing the third of the five planned tours, to the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) for the end of this month of March.
Already in the last year of his current term, and with an intense electoral calendar in parallel, Sánchez will barely get off the plane. An example: just between these first two tours to pave the way for the European rotating presidency, the Spanish president met with the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, in Kyiv, he was the protagonist of PSOE electoral rallies in Zaragoza and Badajoz, he attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with the King, and yesterday he traveled to Ceuta, to inaugurate the Tarajal health center, whose beach was the scene of another tragedy in which fifteen sub-Saharan Africans died trying to reach Spain in February 2014, during the term of Mariano Rajoy .
Precisely the difficult migration and asylum pact in the EU is one of the files that Sánchez seeks to give a boost to during his rotating presidency of the Council. But it is a matter in which the head of the Executive maintains serious differences with the three prime ministers with whom he will meet on this new tour: the Irishman Leo Varadkar, from the conservative Christian-democratic party Fine Gael; the Danish Mette Frederiksen and the Finnish Sanna Marin, both Social Democrats. In Moncloa, however, they admit that it is "more useful" to talk with those who have differing positions on the matter, to try to approximate positions, than with those who are already fully in tune on the matter.
"Very good personal harmony" is, however, the relationship attributed to Sánchez with Frederiksen and Marin. Both already visited Moncloa at the beginning of last year. The Spanish president also shared his first visit to Kyiv with the Danish prime minister in April 2022. And both also attended the NATO summit in Madrid in June last year, when Russia was already considered a threat to Europe. . But if on that first visit to Moncloa Marin warned that Finland's accession to the Atlantic Alliance was not on the table, just yesterday the Finnish Parliament approved its entry, at the same time that it began to build a fence on its border with Russia.
Frederiksen and Marin will now have separate "deferences" with Sánchez. The first will receive you at her residence in Marienborg, and not in her office in Christianburg –the Borgen of the popular Danish television series–, while the second plans to invite you to eat in a charming restaurant in Helsinki. Although, as always, the clock is ticking and they won't have much time available to enjoy it.
Sánchez continues in this way, covering destinations little traveled by the Spanish leaders. In fact, according to the data handled by Moncloa, the last visit by a Spanish president to Dublin was the one made by Mariano Rajoy in 2014. Sánchez himself wanted to include a trip to the capital of La Verde Erín a year ago, to meet with the then Irish Prime Minister, Micheál Martin, when he was looking for allies for energy reform within the European Council. But Martin tested positive for covid, he had to stay in the United States, where he was visiting Joe Biden, and the personal meeting with Sánchez was suspended, which had to take place by videoconference. The visit to Dublin comes just after the agreement reached between the EU and the United Kingdom on Northern Ireland.
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was, for his part, the last Spanish president to visit Finland, in 2006 and on the occasion of an informal summit of the European Council, and Denmark, already in 2008.
The President of the Government maintains differences with the Prime Ministers of Ireland, Denmark and Finland on immigration policy, or on the reform of the electricity market that Sánchez champions. On the other hand, there are harmonies between the four regarding the promotion of the competitiveness of the European internal market. But, as happened on his previous tour, the Spanish president's intention is to "listen", first hand, to the positions that Martin, Frederiksen and Marin put forward regarding all the files that are on the table, and to know their " red lines” to try to approximate positions and achieve the maximum possible agreements during the Spanish presidency of the EU. And his will, as he insists, is to break the politics of blocks between the north and the south within the community club. In Moncloa they highlight that there are possibilities of reaching consensus, because the discrepancies are no longer as marked as in 2020, when the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic broke out. But work, of course, Sánchez will not lack.
