Theresa May has agreed that any trade deal that may be made will not necessarily include Gib.
Brexit: May gives way over Gibraltar after Spain's 'veto' threat
The recent fuss seems to have worked out quite well for the Spanish government. They can claim to have won. Yesterday's
El Mundo (a broadly pro-PP newspaper) had an article by the horrible García-Margallo fondly supporting Borrell, the current Foreign Minister, for his latest position over Gibraltar.
In a way, what has just hapened is simply a reiteration of the existing situation. The EU had already agreed that a trade deal with the UK could only include Gib if Spain was happy with the outcome of Spanish-British negotiations.
In a another way, however, there is a change. The position of the Sánchez government has shifted. I remember Borrell saying not long ago (a couple of months ago maybe) that the negotiations were not about sovereignty. Now we have Sánchez saying that they must talk about 'joint sovereignty'.
'Joint sovereignty' was the notion - or at least the phrase - at the heart of British-Spanish negotiations back in about 2002. Peter Hain thought he could reach an agreement with the Spanish govt, led by Aznar, and then persuade the Gibraltarians to accept it. He was wrong. The talks broke down partly because the British and Spanish sides had very different ideas about what joint sovereignty would mean, with the British thinking it would be a permanent solution and the Spanish thinking it was a transitional period from British sovereignty to Spanish sovereignty. The main reason, however, was that the Gib govt reacted by holding a referendum which rejected the idea of 'joint sovereignty' almost unanimously. 98.48% voted against.
I really wouldn't have expected Sánchez to be one of those gentlemen who chant
¡Gibraltar español!, just like the crowds who some decades ago used to fill Plaza de Oriente to shout that slogan in support of the aged little general with the piping voice, up on the balcony of the royal palace. It doesn't really seem Sánchez's style or the sort of thing he went into politics to do, but I suppose he thinks it is prudent to go along with the shouty Spanish right on this question.
[Edit: The Spanish right is more internally competitive than it used to be and I reckon this tends to make them worse on the Gib question. For many years, PP was the only serious party of the Spanish right. Other right-wing parties were either limited to particular parts of Spain and were not
españolistas or were tiny electorally insignificant sects, descended in many cases from the Falange or the Carlists. In this situation, it was possible for more careful, more conservative Conservatives like Rajoy to steer away from unnecessary conflicts.
Now there is Ciudadanos competing with PP to wave the flag and take an even harder line against Catalan separatism. In addition, one smaller right-wing party called Vox, a split some years ago from PP, has gained a little bit of support. They are not going to win any elections, but with their support now at somewhere between 2 and 5%, according to opinion polls, the bigger parties, especially PP, are under more pressure to retain the support of the sort of people who really do like to shout
¡Gibraltar español! and would be quite keen to fuck up lots of people's livelihoods in pursuit of their hateful irredentist dreams.]
It is potentially bad news for Gibraltar. The Gibraltarians would like to carry on with normal economic relations with Spain. It really would have suited them (and lots of other people) if this great big Brexit mess had been avoided in the first place.
As for May, I have never liked her at all, but increasingly I feel sorry for her. All that effort and all those concessions just to get to a Brexit proposal that the Brexiteers don't want. What's the point of her?
