The Spanish political calendar for 2023 has several dates underlined in red: the municipal and regional elections in May, the legislative elections in December and the rotating presidency of the European Union during the second semester. It will be the fifth time that the country assumes such a task and the first in which it will coincide with an electoral campaign. But there are so many open dossiers in Brussels that will affect the Spanish presidency that it is to be hoped that the Government and the opposition understand from July 1 that It is a State commitment and that any partisan approach will erode the country’s foreign image and even its ability to face pressing problems that you will surely inherit of the Swedish presidency, which began on Sunday.
First of all, the predictions made yesterday by the director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, about the recession that is looming due to the slowdown in the economy in the United States, China and the European Union, little less than guarantees a horizon of economic crisis, perhaps not very long, but with certain repercussions on the social climate. In such a way that the effects on the European economy of the war in Ukraine –impossible to foresee how it will evolve–, with consequences especially pernicious in the energy market, Runaway inflation and security cost overruns will add to the problems resulting from the recession, which could affect a third of the world economy, according to the IMF study.
There are other elements of an economic nature that pass from one presidency to another whose process is increasingly complex: the climate emergency and the reform of the electricity market. The social repercussion of both issues affects the production model and it is essential that action plans see the light of day, with an important appointment at the end of the year, the COP28 conference, whose previous editions have been more a reason for frustration than progress. These are dossiers in which it will weigh more the collective commitment of the European partners than the imprint of the rotating presidency, but Spain can present your experience in the field of alternative energy and play a driving role in promoting changes in the energy mix.
For this to be effective in these sections and other –The solvent application of the Next Generation program, the links with Latin America, the management of migratory flows in the Mediterranean – it is essential that electoral strategies do not interfere with the presidency. In this sense, it would be healthy that before July he found an exit to the very long abnormality of a General Council of the Judiciary whose mandate has expired four years ago, while preventing the Commission from calling Spain’s attention once again, embroiled in an institutional crisis that the PP does not seem willing to deactivate under any circumstances.
It is inevitable that two electoral appointments separated from each other by only six months force us to consider 2023 a year in permanent campaign. But it would be extremely detrimental if this foreseeable climate were echoed in European forums. There are precedents to hope that such a thing does not happen, the most recent, the presidency of France in the first half of 2021, when Emmanuel Macron ran for re-election against Marine Le Pen and managed to reasonably separate the internal competition from the European commitment. All parties would do well to take note of this, but from those who can most expect an exercise of Europeanist responsibility is from the two great ones.