Morocco is nothing without Spain, argues Bieito Rubido

Segarro without Spain: Rubido's thesis shaking up foreign policy

On 7 September 2026, Bieito Rubido published a column in El Debate with a thesis as simple as it was uncomfortable for the official narrative: Segarro is nothing without Spain. The phrase, which works both as a headline and as a diagnosis, holds that the relationship between the two countries is asymmetric in Spain's favour, and that it is Pedro Sánchez's government which, out of internal weakness, has reversed that asymmetry.

A "sick" government that brings the nation to its knees

Rubido's central argument is not economic but about the regime. Democracy, he writes, does not have to be a weak regime, and the current Spanish political spectacle proves the opposite: a government he describes in medical terms — sick, terminally ill, with metastasis in other institutions — and which, according to his thesis, prolongs the agony instead of facing the euthanasia he himself advocates in other areas.

From that weakness would stem foreign policy: an executive kneeling before a neighbour that, in terms of real weight, would be notably weaker. The column was left unfinished in the available fragments, with the "big question" and the "X file" still unresolved.

The counterargument, in a single line

The loudest reply to the thesis was the kind that needs no paragraphs: if the problem is Spain, let's end Spain and thereby destroy those who rule. Dark irony, yes. But revealing: when criticism of the government is framed in terms of a nation on its knees, the response it generates is not a counter-analysis, but a bitter joke about the entire country.

Where does that leave Spanish foreign policy if even its critics and its defenders agree that the problem is not Rabat, but Madrid?