Spain’s prime minister said he fully intends to veto the Brexit deal if no agreement on Gibraltar can be found.
And he warned that if there’s no agreement, the European Council on Sunday “will most likely not take place.”
“Not enough guarantees have been given yet around the agreement that’s being negotiated in Brussels and, therefore, Spain maintains its veto,” Pedro Sáncheztold reporters in Havana during a state visit to Cuba.
The Spanish government insists that the Brexit deal must make clear that negotiations on the future relationship between Gibraltar and the EU will be conducted separately to those between the U.K. and EU, and that they can only proceed with Madrid’s approval.
Asked whether he will attend the European Council in Brussels on Sunday, at which EU leaders are expected to endorse the Brexit deal, Sánchez said: “If there’s no agreement, it’s obvious that what’s going to happen is that the European Council, very likely, won’t take place.”
Madrid’s main concern is Article 184 of the draft Withdrawal Agreement, which Spanish officials argue was introduced at the last minute and without their knowledge — which casts a doubt over Spain’s legal standing to set the terms of Gibraltar’s future relationship with the EU.
While Spain had at first insisted that the Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration be changed to accommodate its demands, another potential solution seems to be under discussion.
Earlier Friday, Spain’s state secretary for the EU, Luis Marco Aguiriano, told reporters in Brussels after a meeting of negotiators that the EU had offered Madrid “a package” of measures to meet its demands.
Aguiriano said that the EU27 were ready to endorse the Spanish position on how Article 184 should be understood regarding Gibraltar in a separate statement. However, he also said that the British government had made a “promise, a commitment” to declare that they share the interpretation of the article made in the EU27 statement.
“We’re waiting to see that [British] declaration in written form,” he added, “and we have demanded that, if they do it, they should make it public before the European Council.”
Aguiriano said the future relationship between the U.K. and the EU will have the legal form of an international treaty and, as such, require ratification by all remaining EU member countries, including Spain.
“So in any case, we would still have a veto in the end,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is … clarify everything at the beginning precisely to be able to avoid such a veto.”
In Madrid, education minister and government spokesperson Isabel Celaá said the Spanish government had “clearly decided to stand its ground.”
“The government wants that the EU takes more interest in the Spanish position on Gibraltar,” she said. “For us, this is not just another demand, this is the demand that we have as a country.”
The Spanish demands over Gibraltar were first endorsed in the 2017 guidelines for the Brexit negotiations, which stated that “no agreement between the EU and the United Kingdom may apply to the territory of Gibraltar without the agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the United Kingdom.”