Madrid
The twenty-sixth Franco-Spanish summit was shaken up a bit by the announcement of the suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in France.
The symbols summoned to this meeting were nevertheless strong.
Four years after the meeting between Mariano Rajoy and François Hollande in Malaga, Emmanuel Macron received Pedro Sanchez in Montauban on Monday, while their main ministers were discussing by videoconference.
In the cemetery of the Occitan city rests in a modest tomb, and only locatable on the indications of a local association, Manuel Azaña, President of the Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, who died in exile.
It was the first time that a French head of state paid him homage, while the burial had until then received a single visit from a president of the Spanish government in office, that of the same Pedro Sanchez, in 2019. With Azaña is also honored the memory of some 500,000 losers of the civil war, refugees in France from 1939, and who were first interned in camps for
"unwanted foreigners"
.
150,000 French people live in Spain
This bilateral summit, which is a rarity in the French context of a resurgence of the pandemic, it is stressed on the Spanish side, is also an opportunity to seal the friendship between the two countries with concrete progress.
The two heads of the executive have signed a dual nationality agreement.
On the other side of the Pyrenees, this is a first with a country that is neither Spanish-speaking nor Portuguese-speaking.
Until now, a Spaniard who obtained French nationality had to legally renounce his Spanish passport, and vice versa - in fact the authorities turned a blind eye.
When the reform is applied in both countries, dual nationals will be able to display their original papers without hiding those of their adopted country, and vice versa.
A privilege which, in Spain, had until then been granted only to countries where Spanish or Portuguese are official or historical languages: Latin America, Equatorial Guinea, Philippines, Portugal, Andorra.
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The migratory journey of Pedro Sanchez
Some 150,000 French people live in Spain, where it takes ten years of residence before being able to apply for nationality - or one year in the event of marriage to a Spaniard - while 190,000 Spaniards reside in France.
Emmanuel Macron saw in this agreement "
a common future
" for "
a generation of fully Franco-Spanish citizens".
This convention, added Pedro Sanchez,
“corrects a historical anomaly”.
The tête-à-tête should also be an opportunity to prepare some major bilateral issues in the run-up to the European summit on March 25 and 26.
Among these were the fight against illegal immigration, terrorism, as well as the overhaul of the rules of the Schengen area, which the two leaders, French and Spanish, are in favor.
Madrid also took advantage of the summit to convince Paris of the benefits of the health passport as summer approaches.
In 2019, tourism accounted for 12% of Spain's GDP, a proportion that has tripled in some regions such as the Canaries.
Spain is in dire need of welcoming foreign visitors.
It will be necessary to determine "
which vaccines will be recognized, perhaps not all
" and
"if we will ask people for tests
", however cautiously underlined the French president, constantly brought back to the treatment of the pandemic.