Marrakech – Fifty years after the Madrid Accords outsourced Western Sahara’s fate to paperwork and postponement, Madrid has reappeared – not as the stage for imperial exit, but as the laboratory of settlement. This month, the US convened Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, and the Polisario in the Spanish capital under a Security Council framework that openly narrows the field toward autonomy.
One might expect a hardline anti-Morocco outlet like El Independiente – which has at times, often occasionally, flirted openly with the Polisario’s mythology – to cling to comforting cartographies and slogans. This past November, it even went so far as to briefly adopt the fantasy map of the so-called “SADR,” emblazoned with the Polisario flag, as a celebratory emblem alongside its own logo to mark the “fifty years of struggle.”
What is harder to justify, though, is El País. A paper that prides itself on speaking the idiom of modernity has nonetheless inherited, recycled, and laundered the same anachronism: the fiction that the dispute still resides in the antique grammar of “decolonization,” as if time has stood still and the balance of power has not already written the contours of any plausible endgame.
Samir Bennis, author and political analyst, put the matter bluntly this week when he urged El País to stop peddling “half-truths” – most notably the “80/20” fable, which alleges Morocco controls 80% of the territory while the Polisario “controls” 20% – calling it an “enormous absurdity” and an “absolute falsehood.”
Bennis went further: the Polisario, he argued, does not exercise any meaningful, sovereign control; its militias cannot roam freely, and the last time it attempted to impose itself as a territorial fact – at El Guerguerat in November 2020 – it was removed swiftly by Morocco’s forces.
Whether one agrees with every adjective in that indictment is less important than the core point: El País keeps describing a strategic environment that no longer exists, and by doing so it serves not as a chronicler of reality but as a curator of nostalgia.
This is not merely a dispute about numbers on a map. It is a dispute about authority over meaning – who gets to define what “the Sahara question” even is in 2026. On paper, Spain’s central government has shifted its position on the Sahara. In April 2022, it described Morocco’s autonomy initiative as “the most serious, realistic and credible” basis for a solution. Yet parts of Spain’s political-media ecosystem behave like a state within the state: they perform a parallel foreign policy of sentiment and self-image.
Left and right diverge, yet converge in sustaining the separatist illusion
Within Spain’s far right, the Sahara question is framed less through raison d’État analysis than through anxiety, inheritance of frontier myth, civilizational insecurity, and a reflex to treat Morocco not as a neighboring state but as a perennial menace requiring moral containment.
Everything, then, filtered through the fossilized pathology of the “Moor”: a medieval specter resurrected to soothe modern insecurity. Morocco is not perceived as a sovereign neighbor but as an eternal invader, a civilizational trespasser whose very existence offends a wounded national ego.
Morocco is constructed as a demographic, cultural, and strategic threat, echoing what political theory describes as neo-Reconquista nationalism – a fusion of historical grievance, identity panic, and securitized othering. This current draws on Orientalist tropes, migration fear, and border militarism, treating North Africa not as a geopolitical neighbor but as an existential liability.
The Sahara has thus become a symbolic battlefield that is instrumentalized to legitimize xenophobic agendas at home, where Islam, migration, and territorial sovereignty collapse into a single narrative of siege. In this delirium, policy coherence yields to identity warfare.
The Spanish left approaches the Sahara not as a solvable political dispute but as a moral performance. It reaches instinctively for the familiar liturgy – rights, self-determination, the sanctified romance of “people’s cause” – reciting it with ritualistic certainty while refusing to confront the operational collapse of the “referendum” dogma it repeats like scripture.
Detached from real power dynamics, demographic facts, and any workable enforcement mechanism, this approach replaces serious policy thinking with moral signaling. By casting itself as the conflict’s conscience, the left confuses ethical posture with the ability to actually produce results.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: activism that mistakes itself for policy does not “help end” a conflict; it helps prolong it. In practice, it does not mitigate the impasse; it entrenches it. Seeking to present itself as the solution, it ends up functioning as part of the problem. It keeps the Polisario’s maximalism on life support by offering it what it now lacks in diplomatic rooms: symbolic oxygen.
It encourages Algeria’s old strategy – freeze, delay, deflect – by pretending Algiers can remain a “concerned neighbor” rather than what the Security Council process has increasingly treated it as: a principal party whose full accountability is structurally decisive.
Madrid talks closed the era of managed paralysis
The Madrid meeting matters precisely because it signals a transition from managing a stalemate to engineering a settlement. For decades, the international community tolerated the dispute as a low-cost paralysis. Now, driven by Sahel instability, migration pressures, and the strategic cost of an open wound in North Africa, Washington has chosen to press the parties into direct good-faith engagement in a forum it can supervise.
Resolution 2797 – adopted October 31, 2025 – did not merely renew MINURSO; it sharpened the negotiating lens by calling for discussions “taking as a basis Morocco’s Autonomy Proposal.” That phrasing is not rhetorical ornament. It is an instrument of discipline, functioning as a constraint mechanism that restricts the spectrum of acceptable outcomes, channels negotiations toward a single implementable horizon, and strips political pantomime and theatrical absolutism of leverage – relegating symbolic grandstanding to political irrelevance.
El País can, of course, dislike that reality. But journalism is not a sanctuary for dislike. When it clings to the trope of “non-governing territory pending decolonization” as if the General Assembly’s vocabulary were the decisive engine, it commits an analytical error: it confuses a legal label with a governing mechanism.
In this dossier, it is the Security Council – through its resolutions, renewals, and mandate-setting – that has functioned as the operative machinery of decision, not the declaratory rituals of other UN bodies. Moroccan diplomacy has worked this terrain patiently and methodically, shaping language, building coalitions, and translating geopolitical shifts into binding texts.
When El País parrots outdated, obsolete formulae without engaging this evolution in Council language, it neither clarifies international law nor reflects diplomatic reality; it actively manufactures confusion, obscuring how outcomes are now forged and by whom.
And confusion is not neutral. Confusion is political. It fortifies the very deadlock it claims to lament. El País’s repeated reference to a “former Spanish colony” reflects a familiar European entitlement, as if Spain still possessed ownership or custodial authority over a reality it no longer governs.
It flatters Spanish exceptionalism by implying Spain remains the moral administrator of a territory it left in 1975. It allows domestic audiences to indulge a melodrama in which Spain is forever the ethical referee – while the actual stakeholders negotiate elsewhere, sometimes literally behind closed doors, sometimes without Spain at the table.
What Spain needs now is not more sanctimony in newspaper prose, but a reckoning with how its discourse became a hostage to two obsessions: the right’s civilizational paranoia and the left’s humanitarian romanticism. Both reduce Sahrawis to instruments – either of fear or of virtue signaling – while refusing to grapple with the emerging settlement architecture.
If El País wishes to be part of the solution, it should begin with an act of editorial adulthood: retire the myths, stop laundering fantasies as “analysis,” and write about the Sahara as it is being negotiated today – under the hard constraints of power, security, and enforceable outcomes – not as it was imagined in the sentimental ruins of 1975.
Read also: Madrid Talks Signal Beginning of Algeria’s Admission of Defeat on the Sahara