King Felipe VI and Claudia Sheinbaum end the rift between Spain and Mexico with a meeting at the National Palace

It was the photo everyone was expecting. After seven years of strain, King Felipe VI and Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, shook hands on Thursday at the National Palace in Mexico City. The two heads of state took advantage of the king’s attendance at the Spain–Uruguay soccer match on Friday in Guadalajara to meet. The encounter, which was brief — as the president had already indicated — buried the political and diplomatic rift between the two countries that began with the controversial letter asking for forgiveness for Spain’s conquest of Mexico, sent in 2019 by then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

It took months of meetings, small and large diplomatic gestures, exhibitions and cultural awards, but Spain and Mexico have finally restored their political relations. This relationship had been almost frozen for years and led, for example, to Sheinbaum not inviting the King to her inauguration in 2024, or to no member of the Royal Household attending last year’s Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), where Spain was the guest country. Everything now seems set to move past that, allowing both countries to focus on their inevitable cultural and economic ties, which never ceased even during the diplomatic rift.

This was recalled by Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) in a statement released on Thursday, noting that Spain is Mexico’s second-largest trading partner within the European Union, with bilateral trade totaling $11.1 billion. The ministry also stressed — amid the limited information released about the meeting — that it “takes place in a context of strengthening bilateral relations and recent gestures by Spain acknowledging the importance of our country’s Indigenous peoples.”

On her YouTube account, the Mexican president shared a video just over three minutes long, showing the two heads of state standing side by side as the Mexican and Spanish national anthems play in the National Palace, decked out with the flags of both countries. After the music, Sheinbaum and Felipe VI turn toward each other and shake hands, as a voice in the background announces: “The official photograph of the heads of state will now be taken.”

“This photo could not have happened with López Obrador,” says Mexican international analyst Pía Taracena, who sees the image as part of the president’s own distinct approach. Sheinbaum has largely preserved the pillars of foreign policy established by her predecessor: firm support for Cuba, strained relations with Ecuador, and alignment with Pedro Castillo in Peru, among others. Normalizing relations with Spain is one of the few areas where she has diverged from his strategy.

Diplomatic tensions with the Spanish Royal Household were one of the legacies Sheinbaum inherited from her mentor and the founder of her party, Morena. In 2019, López Obrador sent a letter to Felipe VI urging the king to revisit and acknowledge the abuses committed during the conquest and to apologize for them. The letter was leaked, prompting the Spanish government to respond by “firmly rejecting” the demand. The controversy that followed — described by Mexican historian Alfredo Ávila as actually “sensible,” since it even proposed the creation of a working group to review the past and called for apologies not only from Spain but also from Mexico to Indigenous peoples — kept the two countries at odds for years.

Ávila, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), believes that López Obrador’s rhetoric on the conquest served to “present a nationalist front and stir Mexican patriotism” during Donald Trump’s first presidency, when the Republican was already talking about building a wall to be paid for by Mexicans. “It would have been very easy to inflame nationalist sentiment against the United States, but of course that didn’t suit López Obrador. Doing it with Spain came at little cost, because cultural, academic, economic, and social ties were maintained,” the historian reflects.

Now the scenario is entirely different. In the era of “Trump 2.0,” the United States constantly threatens military intervention in Mexico, accuses Morena governors of links to organized crime, and is threatening not to renew economic agreements. Against this backdrop, the meeting also allowed Sheinbaum to seal the normalization of diplomatic relations with one of her strategic allies at a time of mounting pressure from the United States. Leading up to the photo with the King of Spain were the signing of a treaty with the European Union, a gathering of progressive leaders in Barcelona, and a recent rapprochement with the United Kingdom.

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