The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, described this Wednesday as “unacceptable” and “inexplicable” the decision of the Mexican government not to invite King Felipe VI to the inauguration of the new president of that country, Claudia Sheinbaum. A decision that has already given rise to a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirming that Spain will not send any other official or diplomatic representation.
In an appearance before the media at the headquarters of the Permanent Mission of Spain to the UN, where he is participating in the UN High-Level Week, Sánchez explained that Spain cannot accept this exclusion and that, for this reason, he decided not to send any representative to the inauguration. In this sense, he added that this matter, which attributed to “political interest”generates frustration about what this means for relations between two brotherly countries.
The head of the executive, who described the matter as a “diplomatic crisis with Mexico,” avoided commenting on his private conversation with Sheinbaum in which, as the president-elect of Mexico herself explained, she was informed of the king’s exclusion. “As for the conversations that I have, in this case, with the president-elect of Mexico, I will not make any statement, because it remains within the framework of discretion,” he concluded.
Sánchez called Mexico a “brother country,” and even, when developing his message, he stressed that “we are a brother people and, therefore, it seems absolutely unacceptable to us that the presence of our head of state is excluded.” , he said, also recalling that Felipe VI “attended all the inaugurations” of Latin American presidents, since he was Prince of Asturias, as the head of government himself recalled.
The head of the Executive avoided commenting on the fact that, although they are not members of the Government or the administration, two important leaders of his coalition partner, Sumar, such as his parliamentary spokesman Íñigo Errejón, and deputy Gerardo Pisarello, will attend Sheinbaum’s inauguration. In the case of Pisarello, he is also a member of the Council of the Congress of Deputies.
Sánchez also showed his disappointment and even his “enormous frustration” at the fact that it is a foreign government of the same ideological tendency with which this conflict took place. “They are progressive governments, the one that has existed so far in Mexico, with López Obrador [Andrés Manuel López] at the head, now also with the president-elect… we are also a progressive government, and it seems that we cannot normalize our political relations for something that, in short, with all due respect, I believe that Spain has already established a position of empathy towards Mexican society,” he said, in a veiled reference to that country’s demands for our country to apologize for the conquest centuries ago.
In the same vein, Sánchez recalled in a laudatory tone the actions of former Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, when, in the post-war period, he welcomed exiles from the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, even providing them with maritime means to make the journey.
