Spanish minister says a sovereign Scotland would have to ‘join the queue’, but Rajoy may decide Madrid has more to lose than gain in wielding veto

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Reactions in Spain to Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement of a second referendum on Scottish independence varied sharply and, above all, geographically.

The country’s foreign minister, Alfonso Dastis, said Spain hoped the UK would remain together but added that a sovereign Scotland would have to “join the queue” to get back into the EU.

The response in Catalonia – where the regional government is planning to hold what it sees as a binding and valid independence referendum in six months’ time – was blunter.

The region’s president, Carles Puigdemont, drew a mischievous comparison between Sturgeon’s announcement and the high court’s decision on the same day to bar his predecessor from office for two years for staging a symbolic and illegal independence vote in 2014.

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“What a mistake!” Puigdemont tweeted, referring to the court’s ruling. “How different from stable and healthy democracies.”

Despite the fact that both the Spanish government and the country’s constitutional court argue that the looming referendum would violate the constitution, Puigdemont says the September poll will be “legal and binding”.

Catalan separatists have long gazed wistfully at Scotland’s push for independence – and especially at the political mechanisms that allowed the last vote. Madrid, well aware of the boost an independent Scotland would provide to secessionists in the north-east of Spain, has not.

In 2014, Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, warned that that breakup of the UK would provoke recessions, increase poverty and act as a “torpedo to the vulnerabilities of the EU”.

The question now, in the wake of last year’s Brexit vote, is how far the Spanish government will go to protect EU cohesion and send a message to the pro-sovereignty movement in Catalonia.

As with any EU member state, Spain would have the right to veto Scotland’s attempt to rejoin the union. But it studiously avoided making such a threat three years ago and, as yet, shows no sign of doing so this time around.

Antonio Barroso, an analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo Intelligence, says that Rajoy is, as usual, biding his time until the situation becomes clearer.

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Barroso argues that the Spanish government will only make up its mind if and when a second Scottish referendum is held and proves successful for Sturgeon.

“I think they’ll deal with it when they have to deal with it; it’s basically the decision-making mode of Rajoy,” he says. “The Spanish government has been very adept at not showing its cards until the moment of decision.”

For the moment, he says, Spain is employing the same strategy it is using in the Brexit negotiations with the UK: following the EU line and stressing the need for unity.

But, if push comes to shove – and if the current government is still in power at the time of a second Scottish referendum, something by no means guaranteed, given Spain’s recent political turbulence – the famously risk-averse Rajoy could well decide that Spain has more to lose than gain through using its veto.

Barroso points to how Poland has found itself isolated in the EU after trying to derail the re-election of Donald Tusk as European council president.

“[It’s] shown that trying to veto something and being left in a minority is a very powerless position,” he says.

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“It might put you in a very difficult situation going forward because the EU isn’t a zero-sum game; it’s a repeated game in which different members states extract gains in successive negotiations.”

Equally unpalatable for Spain is a scenario in which the EU decides to afford special treatment to Scotland or cuts it a precedent-setting deal.

“In any decision like that, Spain will always make sure that it’s treated as a separate case and that no parallels are drawn between the Scottish and the Catalan situations,” says Barroso. “That’s the default strategy.”

Ignacio Molina, a senior analyst as the Elcano Royal Institute and professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Madrid, says Spain is extraordinarily unlikely to use its veto, not least because the Scottish push for independence is profoundly different from the Catalan one.

“No one’s talked about a veto and I don’t think there will be one,” he says. “Over the past 20 years, Spain has recognised many states – Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Estonia and Lithuania – which all won independence legitimately. The last country Spain recognised was South Sudan.

“Spain isn’t anti-independence even if, for obvious reasons, it doesn’t like countries becoming independent. There’s no reason why Spain wouldn’t recognise a legally independent Scotland. It would make no sense and be absurd.”



But he nonetheless discerns a coded warning in Dastis’s comments about Scotland needing to join the queue. As the foreign minister – a veteran diplomat whose last job was as Spain’s permanent representative to the EU – should well know, the notion of a membership queue is a myth.

“There is no queue. It doesn’t exist. [Scotland] won’t be behind Turkey. That’s the only contentious thing the Spanish government has said. I think the idea was to introduce a note of complication: to tell Scotland that it won’t all be so simple and easy.”