The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will travel to New York tomorrow, where next Thursday he will address the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Although the President of the United States, Joe Biden, will also be in New York that week, no meeting with him is planned, neither on a bilateral level, nor at the traditional reception that US leaders usually offer to those attending the Assembly, as the host country. This reception has been suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions, and as a result, Sánchez will not have the opportunity to be photographed with Biden either.
The head of the Executive, on the other hand, does have on his agenda in the margins of the Assembly an interview with the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and meetings with the presidents of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, and Bolivia, Luis Arco, whom he will take the opportunity to meet in person. He will also meet with the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, and the Emir of Qatar, Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani.
Sánchez will participate by video in a virtual event organised by Biden, which will be broadcast on Wednesday 22nd, to share the efforts of the international community in the face of the pandemic, from the health point of view, but also from the point of view of the transformation of global governance.
According to government sources quoted by Europa Press, the government has not considered it appropriate to request this bilateral meeting with Biden in the framework of the General Assembly, and will continue to work on it over the coming months. Sánchez travelled to the United States in July, but an interview with the US president was not arranged on that occasion either.
However, the aforementioned sources stressed that the telephone contact between Sánchez and Biden, on the occasion of the Afghanistan crisis, was very “useful”, and assured that, in addition to issues relating to evacuations, “other issues were discussed”. For this reason, they stressed that “the relationship” with the US “is very good” and there have already been “very fluid contacts”. In addition to this call, Sánchez had a brief and controversial meeting with Biden in a corridor during the NATO summit in Brussels in June.
Sánchez’s visit to New York will therefore be the second in barely two months, after the economic tour that took him to that city and also to Los Angeles and San Francisco in July to promote the investment opportunities offered by Spain, thanks to the economic recovery and the European funds that have already begun to arrive.
And once again this time, this will be one of Sánchez’s priorities, together with matters relating to the strengthening of multilateralism, in order to tackle the three great challenges facing the world: the pandemic and the economic crisis derived from it; the climate emergency; and the new geopolitical panorama that has opened up after the crisis in Afghanistan.
The 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly, at which Sánchez will speak on Thursday 23rd in the afternoon, will be the first occasion on which world leaders will be able to meet in person for the first time, after its 75th edition was held in 2020 mainly virtually due to the coronavirus.
For this reason, the Government considered it essential for Sánchez to attend this meeting in person, in which the pandemic will be the focus of many of the debates, and in which the president will also deploy a parallel agenda, as usual, to focus on the issues that most interest Spain now, such as, for example, that the recovery from the economic crisis resulting from Covid is “fair”.
“This will be one of the aspects that he will raise in one of his first meetings in New York, on Monday morning, the 20th, at the event organised by the magnate Michael Bloomberg specifically to talk about the Government of Spain’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan; a colloquium that is the result, according to Moncloa sources, of the meeting that Sánchez and Bloomberg held in July in New York.
In addition, the Spanish government has organised its own colloquium at the Cervantes Institute on Wednesday 22nd to examine in depth the problem of how to tackle recovery in a “fair” way, fighting inequality and social exclusion; an issue that, according to Moncloa, was not so present on the official agenda of the Assembly, which was more focused on the climate emergency and the fight against the pandemic.
Presidents such as those of Sierra Leone, Costa Rica and Sweden will participate in this event; civil society leaders who are experts in this field, such as the chef José Andrés; organisations such as UN Aids, ECLAC and Oxfam; as well as many other leaders and personalities who will participate via videos, such as the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and the economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Sánchez’s agenda will begin on Monday with his participation in ‘The Climate Moment’ forum, organised by the United Kingdom as host country of the next conference on climate change, COP26, which will take place in Glasgow in November.
There he will try to set out Spain’s vision on what is another of the President’s “absolute priority” issues: the ecological transition. According to the sources consulted, Spain is a world leader in this field and, for this reason, it will be “a central issue” on the President’s agenda.
Tuesday will begin with the opening of the 76th session of the Assembly, which Sánchez and the other leaders will attend. Also scheduled for this day is his meeting with the President of Ecuador and a colloquium organised by the President of the European Council, Charles Michelle, on women in conflict, with a special focus on Afghanistan, in which prominent activists, such as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, will participate.
During the week, Sánchez will give several media interviews, such as the one she has already arranged for Tuesday with CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, and she will also take part in think tank colloquiums, such as the one organised by the Council of Foreign Relations on Tuesday, and the Council of the Americas on Thursday. On Wednesday, he will also have the opportunity to visit the Johnson & Johnson laboratories in New York and its innovation incubator.
