Several thousand people demonstrated Sunday noon in the center of Madrid to demand the dissolution of NATO and demand peace, two days before the opening of the next summit of the Atlantic Alliance in the Spanish capital.
A long procession made up of convoys bringing together left-wing activists, anti-capitalists, anti-globalizationists, ecologists, feminists, communists or even movements such as “Fridays for Future” and “Extinction Rebellion” marched calmly and under heavy police escort in order to denounce the holding of the next meeting of the Atlantic Alliance in Madrid from 28 to 30 June.
No minister or prominent representative of the radical left, member of the government coalition, took part in the march, preferring to keep a low profile two days before the summit, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse.
Among the slogans chanted by the demonstrators was often “No to war, no to NATO!” “, while several helicopters flew over the procession on one of the main avenues of the capital.
The placards read: ‘Make peace, not war’, ‘Enough military spending, give to schools and hospitals’ alongside an image of a crying woman from Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica , one of the most famous paintings in the world, which became a plea against the war.
Still others claimed “we don’t pay for your wars” or “Dissolution of armies, Decline, No war between peoples, No peace between (social) classes”.
David Llorente, 45, who works in an association explains that he is present to protest against “NATO, created during the war, in the service of American imperialism, which continues to exist without having made it possible to maintain peace”.
For this anti-capitalist militant, the Atlantic Alliance “promotes war, the arms trade” and “Spain’s foreign policy increases military costs instead of increasing social and health expenditure”.
Virginia Cadiz, 74, also wants to protest “forty years later, again, against NATO: they promised us that we were not going to enter it”, she explains, referring to the date of entry of Spain into the Alliance in the early 1980s.
For this woman who defines herself as an anti-militarist, this summit is only “money, weapons and death”.
According to the Madrid prefecture, 2,200 people took part in the demonstration. The organizers had not given their estimate of the participation.
Host of next week’s NATO summit, Madrid will be placed under tight security with a total of 10,000 law enforcement officers deployed for the meeting, which will include US President Joe Biden, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron and the heads of government of the United Kingdom and Germany, Boris Johnson and Olaf Scholz.
This summit will be dominated by the question of the Russian threat and by the invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24 by President Vladimir Putin.