Spain's Sumar withdraws bill to naturalize Saharawis

Left-wing Sumar party, founded by former communist Yolanda Diaz (currently Minister of Labor), has withdrawn a controversial bill granting Spanish nationality to Saharawis.

Introduced by Tesh Sidi, a member of parliament of Saharawi origin, the bill was intended to grant de facto Spanish nationality to all Saharawis, as a kind of recognition of the Spanish imprint during colonization.

The text was first presented by Podemos, and stipulated that Spain should grant nationality to Saharawis born under Spanish colonization.

In 2022, the ruling workers’ party, Pedro Sanchez’s PSOE, voted against the text.

Then in February 2023, the far-left coalition resurrected the text as a sign of indignation against a new high-level meeting between Morocco and Spain organized in Rabat, proving its dislike for the Kingdom.

At the end of November 2023, Tesh Sidi took up the proposal word for word, defending the duty of “reparative memory”,arguing that she is “a daughter of that generation of Saharawis who had their Spanish nationality taken away from them”.

Finally, the far-left Sumar coalition called for the withdrawal of its bill, presented to the lower house of parliament, without explaining its new decision.

This withdrawal could be explained by Morocco’s new relationship with Spain, and the government’s need to act with a single voice rather than in isolation.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Sumar deputies voted in favor of an opposition proposal from the People’s Party (PP), condemning the government’s support for the Moroccan autonomy plan for the Sahara and calling for the Spanish state to return to its previous position.

MP Tesh Sidi and Polisario representative in Spain Abdellah Arabi did not react to the withdrawal. This is a cold shower for the representatives of the Saharawi separatists in the pay of the Algerian regime.

As a reminder, the Polisario “militant” Tesh Sidi, born in the Sahrawi camps of Tindouf (Algeria) 29 years ago, was rejected in the last elections (communal and regional) on May 28.

The somewhat uncivil and even fraudulent reason for this was that she was registered in Madrid, Malaga and Bilbao, and so received local humanitarian aid three times over.

Appearing registered in three different places, it was indeed fishing for tax, physical or business address difficult to establish. She landed in Congress in the suitcases of Sumar’s leader, Yolanda Diaz, before she decided to accept Pedro Sanchez’s coalition proposal to govern Spain.

In so doing, the question of the Moroccan Sahara was not addressed in the points of the agreement entitled “Spain open to the world and its voice on the international stage”, despite the political tensions raised by the Sumar political alliance against the Kingdom of Morocco and Madrid’s position supporting the autonomy plan in the southern regions.

Yolanda Díaz, whom Polisario voices have cast as a “saving heroine”, has shifted her focus from questioning relations between Madrid and Rabat and Spain’s position on the Moroccan Sahara issue, to concentrate on her country’s domestic affairs, including a dossier on shorter working hours.