Pedro Sánchez speaks by phone with Trump to congratulate him on his electoral victory

Eduardo González The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, held a telephone conversation on Tuesday with the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, to congratulate him on his electoral victory. “I just spoke by phone with Donald Trump to congratulate him on his electoral victory,” Sánchez declared through his official account on the social network X. “Spain and the US are partners, friends and strategic allies. We maintain close bilateral relations. The US and Europe must continue to strengthen the transatlantic relationship,” he continued. “We will continue to work together to face global challenges,” he concluded. The conversation took place almost a week after Trump's victory in the US presidential elections, held last Tuesday. That day, Sánchez did not even appear at the end of the vote count to congratulate Republican Donald Trump on his victory in the US presidential elections and to commit to continue working with him on “strategic bilateral relations” and on “a strong transatlantic partnership.” During Trump's first term (2017-2021), contacts with Sánchez did not go beyond informal meetings or brief greetings at international events, such as the G20 or NATO summits. There were also no attempts from Moncloa to arrange an official trip by Sánchez to Washington. The distancing became more evident after the formation of the coalition government with Unidas Podemos. The mutual antipathy between the two was already evident from the moment Sánchez arrived at La Moncloa in June 2018. Their first meeting, a month later at a NATO summit in Brussels, was limited to a cold greeting. A year later, in July 2019, during a G-20 meeting in Osaka (Japan), the image of a nonchalant Trump could be seen indicating to Sánchez where he should sit and cutting off any possible dialogue. In this new Trump mandate, observers do not predict an easy relationship between the two, and not only because Sánchez expressed during the US election campaign his preference for the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and described Trump as a “reference of the far-right international”. There are other factors, such as the position of the Spanish Government on some international issues that do not favor the desire to strengthen the strategic partnership with the United States. The most obvious case is the Middle East conflict, where Sánchez has become the champion of the process of recognising Palestine as a state, while the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, knows that Washington's support for his offensive in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon against Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism will be strengthened with the arrival of Trump. Other points of disagreement will most likely be Ukraine - Spain has also been one of the main supporters of Ukraine within the European Union and one of the greatest critics of the Russian invasion, while a change in US policy on the conflict is foreseeable - and US tariffs on European products, with special attention to Spanish black table olives.

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