The Spanish presidency of the EU will open a new phase with Latin America

Relations between the European Union and Latin America will enter a new stage in 2023 with the Spanish presidency of the EU in areas such as digital transformation, innovation and the fight against the environment, as well as pending issues such as trade agreements with Mexico and Mercosur.

Spain will assume the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2023, and has already reiterated on numerous occasions that one of its priorities will be to relaunch the EU club's relations with Latin America, an issue on which, according to experts, the country will play a fundamental role in helping to close pending chapters and open new ones.

The presidency calendar will include an EU-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) summit, a meeting at the highest political level that has not taken place since 2015.

And, according to the former Argentine Foreign Minister and current president of Global Women Leaders, Susana Malcorra, the success of the meeting will not only depend on Latin America coming 'with certain basic positions agreed as a region', but also on 'Spain's ability to highlight the value of its ties with Latin America'. 

The trade chapter is one of the great "pending debts" of both regions, according to Argentina.

At the beginning of December, the EU and Chile signed an agreement to modernise the framework that has governed their trade relations for two decades, which represented a "first step" towards 2023, "the year of Latin America in Europe and of Europe in Latin America", in the words of the head of EU diplomacy, the Spaniard Josep Borrell.

The case of Mexico and Mercosur, currently at a standstill, is different, although for the latter, the arrival of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president of Brazil could provide a strong boost. 

In this respect, the President of the research institute European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), José Ignacio Torreblanca, appeals for cautious optimism regarding progress in this area during the Spanish presidency.

"We are not at a time when free trade is on the agenda, nor is it an agenda shared by all", he warns, but "quite the opposite: we are in a process of de-globalisation and fragmentation with many protectionist tendencies", the Spanish analyst points out. 

Both analysts agree that the six months of Spain's EU presidency is "not enough time" to "have a huge impact", but it is a "fundamental opportunity to establish a sense of direction".

China's presence in Latin America is one of the issues that, according to both, should be of most concern to Europe, which could take advantage of this to look at the region with a certain geostrategic vision. 

In digital matters, the Asian giant has little rival for the moment, since in recent years it has become a major investor and trading partner of many Latin American countries.

This is an issue that is "difficult to reverse" because "the entire development of the region is based on a digital revolution, but also on a green revolution", so if the EU does not manage to make "a value offer that brings together these two pillars", it will not be heard, Torreblanca explained.

Energy and the environment are other sectors where the relationship could be deepened: Latin America is an "energy reservoir", in Malcorra's words, in a European context marked by energy shortages. 

"Latin America has opportunities, especially in green energy," Malcorra defends. However, the EU, which at the global level has a "fundamental" role in establishing regulatory frameworks, finds "limits when it comes to exploiting resources", while other actors - such as China - do so at a higher environmental cost, recalls Torreblanca, pointing to another of the challenges in bilateral relations.

None of them want to anticipate the future and they urge caution in order to see "the result" of the Spanish presidency on these issues. 

"What is achieved will depend on whether the previous work sets the path in motion" so that this effort "is filled with content", Torreblanca explains, "but we have been losing so much time that it is not going to be fixed in two days".

However, Spain's fundamental role must be to remind the rest of Europe that Latin America is not a Spanish-Portuguese affair. 

"We have to tell Sweden and Poland that, if they are concerned about Russia, China and the world order, that is all the more reason to be in the region", the Spanish analyst points out, because "the Chinese and Russians themselves are not there because of cultural or linguistic affinity, but because they understand that it is a strategic priority for them".

For her part, the former Argentinean chancellor reiterates that Spain is a "gateway" to the EU for the region, which went "unnoticed" by the rest of the countries of the Old Continent for a long time. For this reason, the presidency is of crucial value in the face of a Europe that suffers from 'strategic myopia'.