The president achieves this Tuesday the photo that he persecuted so much with the Democratic leader a year after the fiasco of his appointment in Brussels
It happened just over a year ago. On June 14, 2021, in Brussels, at the NATO summit. Pedro Sánchez and Joe Biden, who had inaugurated the position of president of the United States half a year ago, chatted for the first time, but only along a walk down a corridor for less than half a minute. A mere formal greeting. La Moncloa had raised expectations days before, anticipating that they would talk for a few minutes. But it was not like that, although the Government later explained that they had shared before the cameras captured them together. That fiasco (from which, however, came the decision that the next summit would be held in Madrid, in 2022) marked the Chief Executive: a snowball had been fed from his team that no one knew how to stop in time. The setback, as they would later report from their environment, did nothing but add points in favor of the dismissal of his Cabinet director, Iván Redondo. And the dismissal came, barely a month later, accompanied by the promotion, to that same position, of a veteran socialist ‘plumber’, Oscar Lopez.
Since then, Moncloa has tried to manage relations between Sánchez and Biden with much more caution. Finally, both will see each other, already in a bilateral meeting, alone and in the presidential palace, this Tuesday. At 4:00 p.m. But the government let the White House advance the news, advance that the Democratic leader would meet in Madrid with Sánchez and with the King, separately. And who stressed that both interviews are intended to reaffirm the “strong bilateral relationship” between the two countries. La Moncloa was simply in charge of later offering the ‘timing‘ and to highlight the “utmost importance” which he conferred on the meeting of the two leaders, because the US is a “key strategic partner”. He did not want to err.
The much persecuted photo with Biden, which will serve to stage the cordiality and the intense ties between the two administrations, will serve Sánchez as the gateway to the NATO summit in Madrid, which will officially open on Wednesday the 29th and which will have its first family photo hours before, at the gala dinner offered by the King and Queen of Spain. the 30 heads of state and government of the Alliance and their spouses. That image will be, in itself, very powerful. The two leaders have subsequently met in multilateral forums —at the G-20 last October in Rome, at the European Council last March in Brussels—, they have talked by phone (the last time, a week ago), but they had never dispatched together and alone. This Tuesday’s will be, as Moncloa underlines, Biden’s first official visit to Spain. A bilateral meeting taking place on the sidelines of the Alliance Summit, which has an entity of its own. Biden will be the tenth US president to set foot in our country: the first, in 1959, was Dwight D Eisenhower, and the last one, in 2016, was Barack Obama.
The appointment, they indicate in the Executive, crowns the “numerous contacts” of the two presidents and the two governments in this last year and a half, since the Democrat replaced Donald Trump. The collaboration was strengthened with the exit from Afghanistan, in which Spain acted as a European ‘hub’ for receiving and caring for refugees, and has been strengthened after the Russian invasion. In fact, Biden conveyed to Sánchez, in the telephone conversation they both had last week, his “gratitude for Spain’s close cooperation” in response to the war in Ukraine, “including its provision of security and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and the support for the strong sanctionsagainst Moscow. So the objective of this Tuesday’s meeting is “to strengthen, update, renew the strategic relationship between Spain and the US”, they point out in Moncloa. It remains up in the air if there will be a return visit by Sánchez to the White House, hypothesis in which the team of the chief executive still does not want to enter: “Every day has its eagerness”. In March 2020, and due to the pandemic, the Kings’ scheduled state trip to Washington.
Also visit Ifema
The Air Force One of Biden will land at the Torrejón de Ardoz air base around 2:00 p.m. from Germany, after concluding the G-7 meeting. The president will be received by Felipe VI. Later, the entourage will go to Moncloa, for the interview with Sánchez, whose duration is estimated at one hour, and which will be followed by a joint institutional statement (without questions). The US president will then march to the Royal Palace, for his audience with the Monarch, prior to the gala dinner in which he will be accompanied by his wife, Jill, who landed on Sunday night in Torrejon. She herself was seen this Monday with Queen Letizia and also had a meeting in Moncloa with Begona Gomez, the wife of the socialist leader. Meeting, state government sources, requested by the American first lady.
The interview with Biden will be the main course for Sánchez on the day prior to the official start of the summit. But he has the agenda loaded from the first hour. Because he receives the prime ministers of Australia at Moncloa at 9:00, 10:30 and 18:00, Anthony Albanese; New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and Iceland, Katrin Jakobsdottir. In addition, he visits the Ifema facilities at 12 noon, which will host the meeting of the Alliance, together with the Secretary General of NATO, the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, with whom he will have lunch in the presidential palace afterwards.
The day closes with the gala dinner at the Royal Palace offered by the King and Queen to the heads of state and government of the 30 allied countries and the presidents of the Council and the European Commission, Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, plus the heads of Sweden Y Finland —accession candidate countries, if Turkey lifts its veto—, and the AP4 (Australia, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand), and their respective companions. Hours later, the summit will open that will put Madrid at the center of the West and Sánchez as host of a key meeting.