Algeria continues its retaliatory measures once morest Spain, guilty in its eyes of beginning to consider the initiative for the negotiation of a status of autonomy in the Moroccan Sahara as the most serious, realistic and credible for the settlement of the dispute around the region. After deciding to increase the price at which it delivers gas to it on the pretext of a general increase due to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia since February 24, 2022, the eastern neighbor has, as revealed the Spanish daily La Razon in its edition of this Thursday, April 14, 2022, closed its market to Spanish cattle. A fact which, notes the newspaper, “may seem minor in the overall context of trade relations between Spain and Algeria”; it remains nonetheless, continues the same source, “significant”. “These are unequivocal signs that something has changed,” La Razon believes.
On the side of Spain, no official reaction is, for the time being, to be noted, but it is necessary to imagine that the incomprehension must be in order given that, as indicated by Spanish governmental sources at the end of the change of position vis-à-vis the Moroccan Sahara, Algeria had been warned upstream; Confident, the Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, had even swept aside any possibility of Algerian reprisals. But Algeria seems determined to want to show its muscles, following having constantly suffered diplomatic setbacks once morest Morocco with the increasingly numerous recognitions of the Kingdom’s sovereignty over its Saharan provinces, starting with that of mid-December 2020 of the world’s leading power, namely the United States.
To punish Spain, it is betting more and more on Italy, to which it has undertaken to deliver more gas to compensate for the possible drop in supplies from Russia. But this is probably not how it will change the mind of the northern neighbour, whose ruling party, in this case the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) of the President of the Government, Pedro Sanchez, comes from once more to defend this April 14, 2022 the new position on the Moroccan Sahara.
