The president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, He opened his speech before the United Nations General Assembly by giving the condolences to Morocco and Libya for, respectively, the earthquake and the floods that have devastated both countries and remembering that “on September 10, a young Spanish woman lost her life in the Bakhmut region, in Ukraine.” Sánchez thus remembered the aid worker Emma Igual, whom she gave as “an example that should lead us to a serene but urgent reflection on the need to take sides in the face of injustice”.
It was the start of an intervention in which Sánchez continued your usual guidelines, such as gender equality, the fight against climate change and multilateralism “against an extremist and reactionary wave that is growing around the world” under the cover of a strategy based on offering “the promise to a mythical past that never existed.” But the acting head of the Government also entered into specific issues in the field of geopolitics. Specifically, he expressed concern about “the serious implications” of the recent coup d’état in Niger. Sánchez warned about the Sahel instability – the strip of countries that extends across the entire southern Sahara desert from the Atlantic to the Red Sea -, a region that, he said, “accumulates years of deterioration and risks becoming a chain of failed states that can spread instability to neighboring regions such as the Gulf of Guinea, already plagued by the terrorist threat.
Sánchez’s reference to the Sahel, a region close to Spain that is going through an institutional collapse amid the indifference of much of the West, was something unusual in an Assembly in which the war of Ukraine has been the dominant conflict. Sánchez also referred to that conflict, to insist, as he had done in his speech before the Security Council, that “Spain is and will be next to Ukraine.” The acting Spanish president also reaffirmed his commitment “to the necessary return to Venezuela’s democratic path to restore hope for a future of opportunities to its population.”