The Spain brand, touched by the pandemic

Arrival of the first German and British tourists at Lanzarote airport, after Berlin and London removed the Canaries from their blacklist.Javier Fuentes Figueroa / EFE

“Spain is the worst in the class.

His poisonous policies have made the pandemic and the economy worse.

It has the worst figures in Europe in both fields, ”wrote the British weekly The Economist on 3 October.

"Is Spain a failed state?" Asked Friedrich Leopold Sell in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the 10th.

"Not yet, but it won't be long," he answered himself.

"Spain has lost control of the pandemic again," stressed days later the German Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung.

These are three examples of the stupor with which the international press contemplates the escalation of the coronavirus in Spain and, above all, the lack of cooperation between institutions and parties, which have turned the pandemic into a political battlefield.

In a country that depends on tourism and the financial mana of the EU for its recovery, the idea that it is unable to efficiently manage its health and economy can have devastating effects.

Manuel Muñiz, Secretary of State for Spain Global (the department that has inherited the management of the Spain Brand) sees no cause for alarm.

He admits that, in the worst of the crisis, there was “a concentration of negative [informative] coverage”, but maintains that “the impact of half a dozen articles in the press should not be overstated”.

This doctor in International Relations whom the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, signed last January, believes that Spain does not have a reputation problem different from that of other countries that are suffering from the pandemic.

"We Spaniards have a strong sense of self-criticism and we perceive ourselves worse than what others see us," he says.

He acknowledges, yes, that polarization serves as an amplifier of bad news and that the permanent hyperbole "of some politicians does not help. Nor does he believe that the reform of the election system of the Judicial Power, now on hold, could damage the prestige of the State of Spanish law in the EU, despite criticism from organizations such as the Council of Europe's anti-corruption group (Greco).

As proof of the resilience of the image of Spain, it refers to the report "The reputation of Spain in the world 2020", by the Royal Elcano Institute, which ensures that "the crisis of covid-19 has not had a significant impact on the reputation of Spain ”and that its position stabilizes, with a score of 76 out of 100, at number 13 in the world ranking.

The problem is that the field work of this study, known in September, was carried out between March and April, at the beginning of the pandemic.

More recent is the International Covid-19 Barometer of the Mesias Institute, an independent think tank dedicated to monitoring the Spain Brand.

The first results of the research, not yet published, show that the image of Spain has fallen 20 points in non-Spanish-speaking countries, even more in Nordic countries.

Especially worrying is that only 29% of the 1,735 respondents (university graduates, mostly doctors) consider Spain capable of facing the health crisis and only 28% believe that it is a good place to invest when the pandemic is overcome .

On the positive side, 84% would recommend it as a tourist destination.

Although Muñiz is reluctant to assume that there is negative coverage of Spain in the international press, he underlines that the periodic meetings with foreign correspondents in Madrid and the briefings of the Spanish embassies with the local press are part of the public diplomacy with which he tries to counter prejudices and topics, in addition to the 130 interviews granted by González Laya to international media.

"The reputation building exercise is permanent and the pandemic is a challenge," he says.

The Secretary of State of Spain Global, on which other organizations such as the Office of Diplomatic Information (OID) also depend, has this year a total budget for all its policies of 1.7 million euros, although some of its initiatives are co-financed by business associations.

Last June, Foreign Affairs, the CEOE, the Chamber of Commerce of Spain and the Forum of Renowned Brands launched the campaign Spain for sure (Spain, sure or of course), in which artists, chefs, scientists and athletes promoted the image of the country after the first wave of the coronavirus.

The idea is to relaunch the campaign in December, this time with the collaboration of foreigners who have chosen to live in Spain.

But it will be impossible to sell that Spain is a safe country if it is not actually so.

The return of tourists to the Canary Islands

Getting the United Kingdom and Germany to remove the Canary Islands from the blacklist was the most urgent objective of Global Spain. The Canary Islands have their peak season in winter and the absence of British and German tourists (5.5 million in 2019, 56% of the total) was a catastrophe. Finally, Berlin and London lifted the veto, so their citizens will be able to travel the archipelago without undergoing quarantine on their return. Foreign Affairs, Health and Commerce worked before the two governments through the respective embassies, although the key was to lower the incidence of infections below 50 per 100,000 inhabitants. Foreign now wants to establish safe tourist corridors for all the autonomies that request it. Under the European umbrella, it negotiates bilateral agreements that allow tourists to take a diagnostic test before leaving and another when they return. If the latter were positive, they would be quarantined at their vacation spot at no cost.