Spain's Sánchez Calls For Abolishing The Security Council Veto To Defend An Order 'Many Are Trying To Destroy'

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 4 Of 15

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Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for the abolition of the Security Council veto at the 81st UN General Assembly, placing Madrid among a small number of Western governments backing one of the Global South's longest-standing demands for reform.

"We must reform the Security Council. So that all regions of the world are fairly represented. And to put an end to the permanent members' right of veto," Sánchez said in his address on Wednesday, September 23. "Because, as the United Nations Charter states, no country should be both judge and party at the same time. However powerful it may be."

He opened with a statement of purpose. "I take the floor here with a single aim, and that is to defend what many are trying to destroy," he said, referring to principles that "various governments, represented here, either scorn or seek to dismantle". He did not name them. According to reports of the speech, he told delegates: "We all know who they are and how they operate."

Sánchez described what he called a "planned and coordinated" effort to dismantle multilateral institutions. "The reactionary forces that want to destroy the multilateral order never stop attacking us," he said. "They want us to be intimidated. They want us to give up." Those forces, he said, wanted the world to believe that the Sustainable Development Goals were lost causes and that cooperation was a sign of weakness. "You are wrong," he told them, "and we will not be silenced."

He reiterated Spain's condemnation of what he called the genocide Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to perpetrate in Gaza, and pointed to measures Madrid had taken against actions it considers contrary to the UN Charter, including sanctions against Russia and an arms embargo on the Israeli government. Multilateralism, he argued, remained the best way to manage global interdependence, and the system needed renewal "so that it can play the same central role in this century that it did in the 20th century". He also said the time had come for feminism to guide the institution.

Spain's position is notable for where it comes from. As a member of NATO and the European Union, Madrid shares the Western defence of a rules-based order. On the veto, however, Sánchez stood closer to Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Malaysia and Finland, all of which called in the same debate for the veto to end, than to any of the five permanent members.

Spain has also aligned with Global South partners on economic inequality. South Africa's national statement the following day said South Africa, together with Brazil, Norway and Spain, was calling on the Assembly to back the creation of an International Panel on Inequality.

The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading, but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.