Beni Mellal – The European Union has formally confirmed its unified support for Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara, dismissing a parliamentary challenge from a coalition of left-wing and green legislators who accused Brussels of abandoning international law.
High Representative Kaja Kallas issued the formal response on Friday, on behalf of the European Commission, following a written question submitted in November 2025 by thirteen Members of the European Parliament, including Irene Montero, Lynn Boylan, Pernando Barrena Arza, Andreas Schieder, Jaume Asens Llodrà, and others from The Left, Renew, Verts/ALE, and S&D groups.
The legislators argued that UN Security Council Resolution 2797, proposed by the United States, “reflects Morocco’s unilateral position” and “alters the legal parameters of the conflict.” They further claimed the EU was “distancing itself from international law and the UN-led decolonisation process” by endorsing what they called the agenda of “the occupying power.”
Kallas rejected the framing entirely. She confirmed the EU, with full unanimity of its 27 member states, updated its Western Sahara position at the EU-Morocco Association Council session held on January 29 in Brussels, explicitly aligning with Resolution 2797.
The resolution supports negotiations “taking as a basis Morocco’s Autonomy Proposal” and recognizes that “genuine autonomy could represent the most feasible outcome.” Kallas added that the EU “stands ready to assist in facilitating consultations between parties within the UN framework.”
The January 29 Association Council, where Foreign Affairs Minister Nasser Bourita and Kallas signed a joint communiqué, marked a structural shift in European positioning.
The 27 member states agreed that “genuine autonomy could represent one of the most realistic solutions” for the dispute’s definitive settlement. The EU also welcomed Morocco’s commitment to “engage in good faith with all concerned parties to clarify the modalities of this autonomy plan.”
A script from another era
The parliamentary challenge from the left-wing bloc is not a legal argument. It is an ideological relic, recycled from a decolonization playbook written before most of its signatories were born.
These legislators invoke 1970s liberation rhetoric with the conviction of people who have never been asked to account for its consequences. Five decades of geopolitical transformation, state-building, regional realignment, and institutional diplomacy apparently register nothing in their political calculus.
Their framing collapses under the slightest scrutiny. The Polisario Front, which they treat as the authentic voice of an oppressed people, has administered a captive population in Tindouf for half a century under conditions that humanitarian organizations have repeatedly flagged, with no census, no freedom of movement, no economic infrastructure, and no horizon.
If this is what liberation looks like to Irene Montero, Lynn Boylan, and their colleagues, the Sahrawi people deserve better advocates.
Labeling Morocco an “occupying power” while treating an Algerian-financed, Algerian-hosted, Algerian-directed militia as a sovereign liberation movement is not principled. It is selective outrage operating on a predetermined conclusion.
The Polisario Front is not a liberation movement in any meaningful contemporary sense. It is a separatist Marxist organization, ideologically fossilized since the Cold War, increasingly viewed through the lens of regional destabilization, and operationally entangled with the same axis of armed non-state actors that has turned the Sahel into a theater of chronic instability and state fragmentation.
The movement’s deepening ties to Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” networks are not a footnote. They are a structural reality that European security services and regional intelligence actors have tracked with growing alarm.
A terrorist militia that trains in Tindouf, takes direction from Algiers, and cultivates relationships with destabilizing transnational forces is not a candidate for statehood. It is a security liability dressed in the language of self-determination.
That left-wing European legislators continue to champion it, recalling decolonization frameworks that the international community has functionally abandoned, is not courageous dissent. It is reckless romanticism that substitutes ideological reflex for strategic judgment and treats a proxy instrument of regional disruption as though it were the ANC.
Autonomy is operational realism
These MEPs have laundered a regional proxy conflict into a human rights cause, stripping it of its geopolitical context and dressing it in legal vocabulary they deploy inconsistently, conveniently, and without consequence.
Their written question to the Commission was not an act of parliamentary oversight. It was a performance. A coordinated attempt to delegitimize a diplomatic consensus that has been building for years and that now encompasses the United States, France, Spain, the UN Security Council, and the European Union collectively.
Thirteen legislators from the political margins of a continent asked Brussels to reverse course and align with a militia that has not won a single meaningful diplomatic battle in thirty years. If the audacity is remarkable, the reasoning is nonexistent.
What these legislators offer as an alternative is the referendum. A vote that has been structurally impossible to organize since 1991, that collapsed over the unresolvable question of voter eligibility, and that no serious diplomatic actor has treated as executable in over two decades.
Clinging to it is not fidelity to international law. It is fidelity to a talking point. It substitutes legal formalism for political responsibility and allows its proponents to maintain moral posturing at zero cost, because they know the referendum will never happen, which means they will never be held accountable for what it would produce.
The EU’s updated stance reflects precisely the kind of pragmatic statecraft these legislators resist. Resolution 2797 does not erase self-determination, nor does it eliminate its legal relevance. It operationalizes it through the only framework that has any prospect of producing a durable outcome: structured autonomy negotiations under Moroccan sovereignty, endorsed by the Security Council and now unanimously by 27 EU member states.
This is not a capitulation to power. It is the mature, hard-nosed application of international law to a conflict where maximalism has delivered nothing except prolonged displacement and generational statelessness.
Spain understood this in March 2022. France followed in July 2024. The January 29 Association Council institutionalized that trajectory into a bloc-wide consensus. The left-wing bloc in the European Parliament has not grasped it, and shows no intention of trying.
Morocco is the largest recipient of EU financing in North Africa, receiving approximately €270 million annually between 2021 and 2024. It is a strategic partner, a regional stabilizer, and the state that actually governs and develops the territory in question.
The Polisario Front governs a camp. It has no economy, no sovereignty, no international recognition beyond a shrinking circle of states, and no answer to the question of what happens the day after independence that it will never achieve.
The left asked Kallas what the EU will do for Sahrawi self-determination. She answered clearly: support negotiations, back the autonomy framework, facilitate dialogue within the UN structure. What the left’s approach would deliver beyond permanent deadlock, continued confinement in Tindouf, and the political comfort of the MEPs championing it, is the question they have never once been forced to answer.
These MEPs are not protecting the Sahrawi people. They are protecting a narrative that flatters their political identity, costs them nothing, and condemns the population of Tindouf to another generation of stateless confinement in service of a cause that the world has moved decisively past.