Spain’s China wager is paying off — and irritating half of Europe
Madrid calls it pragmatism. Brussels hears something closer to freelancing.
Barcelona can still stage a festival without consulting the whole of Europe, which is perhaps just as well. This week, Chinese dragons, acrobats and a Shanghai delegation turned La Mercè into a small exhibition of Spain’s warming ties with Beijing. The symbolism was plain enough: cultural charm on the surface, hard commercial calculation underneath.
Pedro Sánchez has now met Xi Jinping four times in four years, and he has been urging the EU to improve relations with China since Donald Trump’s return to the White House two years ago. In Madrid, that is presented as realism. In several other EU capitals, it looks more like Spain has decided that national gain matters more than European harmony. The old European habit of preaching unity while pursuing one’s own interests, of course, is alive and well.
The money is doing much of the talking. According to ICEX Spain Trade and Investment, Chinese investment in Spain is rising sharply, especially in battery gigafactories and car plants. Spanish officials say Chinese investment has doubled over the past year. The 13,000-kilometre freight rail link between Yiwu and Madrid has become a neat symbol of the relationship: car parts and electronics flow west, while Spanish ham and wine travel east.
There is also a political dividend. A Pew Research Center poll published this summer found that 54 per cent of Spaniards had a favourable view of China, compared with 30 per cent for the United States. That is not an accident. China is seen in Spain as easier to trade with, while Washington, under Trump, is viewed as erratic on tariffs, defence spending and even access to military bases. If allies threaten sanctions when you do not meet their demands, affection tends to become selective.
Still, the unease in Europe is not invented. Germany and France have recently pushed for a tougher line on China, and the European Commission says the trade imbalance with Beijing has reached €1bn a day. Add China’s relationship with Russia, and Spanish enthusiasm starts to look less like diversification and more like a test of how much strain the EU can absorb before it begins to creak.
Security has made the debate sharper. Spain’s interior ministry gave Huawei a €12.3m contract to store and manage sensitive judicial wiretap data, drawing criticism from members of the European Parliament. Spain’s defence ministry denies any risk, but the episode has fed the suspicion that commercial convenience is being allowed to outrun collective caution. That is a familiar European sport, though usually performed with more paperwork.
Spain is not alone in seeking awkward partners. Finland, with its long border with Russia, has turned to Nato and to Israeli equipment because it no longer trusts that Washington would necessarily show up in a crisis. Greece, facing Turkey, has signed a major defence deal with Israel as well. The pattern is clear enough: states are hedging, because the old assumptions about American reliability are weaker than they used to be.
The question is whether these separate deals strengthen Europe by making it more resilient, or weaken it by turning the bloc into a loose collection of national insurance policies. Spain says it is simply doing what others do. Its critics reply that this is precisely the problem: everyone is pursuing strategic autonomy, but only for themselves.
Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com