Reopening of land border with Spain ‘reunion of brothers’ – PM
António Costa announced on Wednesday that the reopening of the border between Portugal and Spain is a reunion between "brothers and friends."
Portugal’s prime minister, António Costa, said on Wednesday that the reopening of the border between Portugal and Spain is a reunion between “brothers and friends” who will carry more weight if they are side by side in the European Union.
António Costa posted these messages on his personal Twitter account before attending official ceremonies in Badajoz and Elvas to mark the reopening of the border with Spain, together with the president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, King Philip VI and the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez.
“Today we signal at the highest level the normalisation of land transit at the border between Portugal and Spain. It is a reunion between neighbours who are brothers and friends. On this open border depends our shared prosperity and common destiny in the European project,” the prime minister wrote.
From António Costa’s perspective, “it is essential for both countries that contacts gradually regain the dimension and dynamics prior to the outbreak of the pandemic” of Covid-19. “I am thinking in particular of the hinterland populations who daily cross the border,” he added.
“The pandemic has offered us the vision of a past to which we do not want to return: a continent of closed borders. Freedom of movement has been consolidated in the minds of European citizens as one of the fundamental principles of the idea of Europe,” he went on to say.
According to the prime minister, in the European Union, “Spain and Portugal must be leading actors in building a Europe whose economic and social model strengthens convergence and, more than hopes, gives certainty to all”.
“We will carry more weight if we fight this battle side by side, Portugal and Spain,” he added.
The land borders between Portugal and Spain had been closed since March 16.
