In Gibraltar, “we are losing a border, there is reason to be happy”

“Well, if it's a journalist saying it, I'm willing to believe it, but I wasn't counting on it.” Elisa Moya, a cross-border worker in Gibraltar, is so skeptical about the UK-Spain deal that she still finds it hard to believe. The 52-year-old employee heard the news as she was leaving the hotel where she's been working for barely a month.

She has just crossed the border that the [June 11] handshake is supposed to make disappear [by bringing Gibraltar into the Schengen area at the cost of Spanish controls at the airport of the British overseas territory]. She likes the idea, but she wants to know more, especially about “what will happen with the pensions of cross-border workers in Spain” . “I don’t intend to do this job all my life, so if the agreement guarantees pensions, I’ll see it differently,” says the Spaniard, before losing herself in the avenue that connects the border crossing point to [the Spanish town of] La Línea de la Concepción .

The agreement comes three years and eight months after the start of negotiations that were supposed to free Gibraltar, along with the Spanish region surrounding it, from the impasse into which Brexit had led it in 2016. And as is often the case when a decision is made after interminable negotiations, there is a strange, cautious, almost cold optimism in the territory. “A relative optimism,” as the mayor of La Línea, Juan Franco [from the localist party La Línea 100x100] defines it.

“So far, I’ve only seen a press release, nothing else. We’re waiting for a meeting with the minister,” the elected official said in an interview with El País, before a press conference. “We were on the brink of disaster. […] It was a matter of life or death,” said the mayor, who was summoned [on June 13] to a meeting with José Manuel Albares, “the fifth minister of foreign affairs.”