A PP councilor demands the UN that the Sahara can vote for independence after the attack by VOX on cooperation

PalmaA PP councilor at the Council of Mallorca demanded this Friday before the United Nations the holding of a self-determination referendum in Western Sahara "that includes the option of independence". The head of Social Welfare and president of the Majorcan Institute of Social Affairs (IMAS), Guillermo Sánchez, defended in New York that the Sahrawi people be able to “freely decide their future”. He did so just one day after VOX, the People's Party's governing partner in the island institution, had harshly attacked the international cooperation policies promoted by the Council itself. Despite governing together in the Council, the PP and VOX thus maintain opposing positions on the institution's foreign action.

Sánchez spoke before the Special Political and Decolonization Committee of the UN General Assembly, known as the Fourth Committee, where he demanded compliance with international resolutions and a "fair, lasting, and international law-compliant" political solution.

From the United Nations headquarters, he defended that “the Sahrawi people have demonstrated their capacity to resist. We do not ask them to continue demonstrating how much suffering they can endure”.

The intervention comes the day after a plenary session of the Council of Mallorca in which discrepancies emerged between the PP and VOX regarding the island institution's international cooperation. The far-right party voted against the Council allocating 1.8 million euros to the Majorcan Solidarity Fund and accused the People's Party of having adopted the postulates of the left.

The Vox spokesperson, Antoni Gili, asserted that his party “does not believe” in either the Fund or the cooperation model it represents and described these policies as “pseudo-charity” intended to “take little trips and play the good Samaritan”. He also asked how much the “plundering of the taxpayer” derived from public contributions to international projects amounted to and argued that these resources should be dedicated exclusively to the residents of Mallorca.

The participation of the two Council officials before the United Nations took place at the request of the Association of Friends of the Sahrawi People of the Balearic Islands and the Polisario Front. One day earlier, Sánchez and Ramis conveyed this same defense of the right to self-determination to the Permanent Mission of Spain to the UN.

The PP, pro-Sahrawi and pro-self-determination referendum

The demand expressed by Sánchez at the UN fits with the official position maintained by the state leadership of the PP, which defends respect for international law and United Nations resolutions regarding Western Sahara. The Popular Party has distanced itself from the shift adopted in 2022 by Pedro Sánchez's Spanish government, which assumed the autonomy plan proposed by Morocco as the “most serious, realistic and credible” basis for resolving the conflict. The PP has also supported initiatives in Congress favorable to the self-determination referendum. Western Sahara

“It is time to act,” the island councilor argued before the UN, demanding decent living conditions for the Sahrawi population, the protection of their rights and freedoms, and an international response that puts an end to exile, the separation of families, and the uncertainty that has marked several generations.

The councilor concluded the intervention with an express request: “To make possible a fair, lasting, and international law-compliant political solution through the holding of a self-determination referendum that allows the Sahrawi people to freely decide their future”.

Children and adolescents

The island director of Centers and Programs for Comprehensive Care for Children and Adolescents, Magdalena Ramis, has also appeared before the Fourth Committee. The IMAS official focused her speech on the children and adolescents who were born and raised in the Tindouf refugee camps, without ever having known their homeland.

“No child or adolescent should have their future conditioned by the international community's inability to resolve a pending decolonization conflict,” warned Ramis. The island director acknowledged the Sahrawi people's ability to maintain their identity and organize community services under particularly adverse conditions, but warned that “resilience cannot become an excuse for inaction.” “Every year of political deadlock is a year of lost childhood. And childhood cannot continue to wait.”