SPAIN’S deputy prime minister has launched a furious tirade at Germany after chancellor Friedrich Merz sat in silence while US president Donald Trump slammed Spain as a ‘terrible’ ally and made an unprecedented threat to cut off all trade.
Relations between the two European Union member states have soured over the past week with Spanish officials furious at the German leader for seemingly failing to stand up for a fellow European ally.
Merz was sitting in the White House last week for a bilateral meeting with Trump when the US president lashed out at Spain and hinted that he would use two jointly-operated bases in Cadiz and Sevilla anyway, even though Spain had already exercised a veto.
Trump said: “Spain, first of all, it started when every European nation at my request paid 5 per cent [of GDP on defence] which they should be doing, and everybody was enthusiastic about it, Germany, everybody, and Spain didn’t do it.
“And now Spain actually said that we can’t use their bases, and that’s alright, we don’t want to, we can use their base if we want, we can just fly in and use it.
“Nobody’s gonna tell us not to use it, but we don’t have to, but they were unfriendly and so I told them Spain has absolutely nothing that we need, other than great people, they have great people, but they don’t have great leadership.
“As you know they were the only country in NATO that would not agree to go up to 5 per cent. I don’t think they wanted to agree to go up to anything, they wanted to keep it at 2 per cent and they don’t pay the 2 per cent.
“So we’re gonna cut off all trade with Spain, we don’t want anything to do with Spain.”
After the meeting, Merz claimed he had not spoken up to defend a fellow EU ally because he did not want to ‘aggravate’ the situation by rebuking Trump in public.
He later told the press that he had informed the president behind closed doors that economic sanctions, such as cutting off all trade, cannot be imposed on a single EU country.
But Merz’s response has done little to quell rising anger in Madrid.
In an interview with POLITICO on Monday, Yolanda Diaz accused the German government of being ‘vassals who pay homage to Trump’ and not demonstrating the required ‘leadership’ for the modern era.
She also said the current generation of EU leaders, such as Merz, ‘have no idea how to manage the historic moment we’re living in’.
Merz has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of ongoing US-Israeli strikes on Iran, which killed supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei in an attempt to topple the country’s Islamic regime.
“Iran is the centre of international terrorism. This centre must be shut down, and the Americans and Israelis are doing that in their own way,” he said.
Spain, on the other hand, has been fiercely critical of military action, describing it as ‘illegal’ and unjustified’.
“The position of the government of Spain in the face of this situation is clear and consistent, the same one we have maintained in Ukraine and Gaza,” prime minister Pedro Sanchez said in a ten-minute televised address last Wednesday.
“No to the collapse of an international law that protects us all, especially civilians. No to assuming that the world can only solve its problems through bombs. Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past. No to war.”
US military planes were forced to leave Andalucia shortly after operations in the Middle East began after the Spanish government blocked the use of its bases for strikes on Iran.
Flight tracking websites showed fifteen US aircraft departing Rota and Moron in southern Spain after foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares said that the bases could not be used for ongoing military operations in the Middle East.
Rota and Moron, in Cadiz and Sevilla respectively, are jointly operated with the US, but fall under Spain’s sovereignty.
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