The Diplomat
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, spent less than half a minute yesterday greeting the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during a walk through the corridors of the NATO Summit headquarters in Brussels. That was the end of the first meeting between the two leaders announced with great fanfare from Moncloa last Thursday.
At least that is what was seen in the images distributed by the Presidency of the Government and other media, in which Biden and Sánchez can be seen talking while walking for several dozen metres.
However, in a subsequent press conference, the head of the Executive assured that the meeting had lasted longer than those thirty seconds, because it had been a “brief conversation” and then a “brief walk”, although his collaborators have not shown other images to corroborate this.
According to Sánchez, this “first contact” was so productive that it allowed him to talk to Biden about “strengthening ties” in military matters and “the situation in Latin America”, and he even had time to convey his concern about the migratory and economic situation in the region as a result of the pandemic.
Sánchez also said that he congratulated Biden for “the progressive agenda that he has set in motion” and for his return to “the great multilateral consensuses, such as the Paris Agreement on climate.
The President of the Government assured that after this first contact they had agreed to “continue working and collaborating and to remain in contact”. For the time being, it is certain that Biden will visit Spain next year, as NATO leaders have agreed that Madrid will host the 2022 summit.
The reality is that this ephemeral contact, which Moncloa sold last week as an arranged meeting with the Biden administration, is more akin to the fleeting greetings of former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero with then US President George W. Bush at multilateral summits. Zapatero, whom Bush had “punished” with his indifference for the abrupt withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, only managed to “redeem himself” with the arrival in the White House of Barack Obama, who, in April 2009, devoted 45 minutes of his time to him at the EU-US summit held in Prague.
Yesterday, the announced “meeting” with Biden was not on the US President’s agenda, which included a joint meeting with the presidents of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan.
The brevity of the contact between Biden and Sánchez mobilised the PP, whose president, Pablo Casado, criticised on his Twitter account that Moncloa spoke of a “high-level summit”, asserting that “reality overrules propaganda”. He also stated that the Prime Minister “has plunged us into international irrelevance” and that the PP will return Spain “to the place it deserves”.
And the deputy spokesman for Foreign Affairs of the Popular Parliamentary Group, Pablo Hispán, announced that they will ask for explanations in the Congress of Deputies: “We want to know who has been responsible for this ridicule and this embarrassment that shames all Spaniards”, he said, adding that the walk demonstrates “the ridicule of Spanish foreign policy”.
For her part, the president of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, said: “The bad thing about these images is that the appalling and embarrassing ridicule is generated by a man who is currently the president of the Spanish government. The damage that Sánchez is doing every day to the image of our country is incalculable”.
