A low profile visit to Biden allows Sánchez to start the campaign from the White House
The pilgrimages of Spanish politicians to the White House have been a constant in the history of democracy. In this sense, Pedro Sánchez has had some luck. Covid-19 and the subsequent blockade of world face-to-face diplomatic activity freed him from having to deal too much with Donald Trump, a very unpopular politician in Spain, especially among the president's bases.
Of course, the image of the US president pointing his finger at the Spanish where he should sit at the G20 'summit' in Osaka, in 2019, remains for history.. But, leaving aside that we don't know what they were both talking about, we must remember that these types of actions were normal for the then president of the United States.. He reserved them neither for second-rate countries nor for political rivals. Whoever wants to check it out can watch the video of Trump blocking the passage of Elizabeth II of England and not waiting for her while the two reviewed the Royal Guard at Windsor Castle in 2018.
Then Biden arrived, who was greeted with joy by the government of Spain. The happiness was short-lived when, at the 2021 NATO summit in Brussels, the new president subjected the head of the Spanish Government to a humiliation next to which Trump's remained as a sample of Versailles protocol.. Biden walked down a corridor for twenty seconds while Sánchez spoke to him without once deigning to look at him and leaving a question for History: did he realize that the Spanish president existed? It was, it is true, a self-imposed humiliation by Spain, which had insisted over and over again that Sánchez was going to have “an informal meeting” with Biden.
Tuning boast at the NATO Summit in Madrid last year. EFE
Moncloa insisted that nothing had happened. But just two months later, Sánchez made a rare trip to New York and California, staying away from Washington and only meeting with mid-level executives from technology, entertainment and financial companies.. It was a journey rather typical of a Secretary of State or a minister, with the exception of two meetings. One, with Larry Fink, the top manager of the largest fund manager in the world, BlackRock; and another with the president and CEO of the most valuable company in the world, Apple, Tim Cook, who imposed as a condition to accept Sánchez's entry into the company's headquarters – a monstrous donut-shaped futuristic building – that the president Spaniard was only accompanied by two bodyguards and an adviser, lest they try to steal the plans for the new iPhone. Sánchez, still hurt by Biden's coldness, accepted, in part because joining Apple took months of negotiation.
But, in the end, the courtship bore fruit at last year's NATO summit in Madrid, in which the Spanish president finally reconciled with Biden.. The White House is very aware of the difficulties that Sánchez has to maintain his Atlanticist and pro-Ukraine position with his coalition partners Sánchez, and Moncloa has known how to use that in his favor. The change of position towards the Sahara has also been welcomed by the Biden team, which has lifted most of the trade sanctions imposed on Spain by Trump, although on occasions it has replaced them with legal formulas that make exports almost as difficult. of certain Spanish products to the US, as confirmed by diplomatic sources. In any case, the romance is sealed, I give, with a photo in a meeting in the White House in which there is really little to talk about, but which, undoubtedly by chance, occurs just the day the electoral campaign begins in Spain.
Trump ordered Sánchez to sit at the 2019 Osaka summit. EFE
Due to his taste for dramatic blows and presidentialism, it could be said that Sánchez is closer to Donald Trump than to Joe Biden. The US president rarely appears on television, and delegates most of his public announcements to his spokespersons.. It may be, in part, due to age. Biden is 80 years old, has motor difficulties that make the White House try to get him to walk in public as little as possible, and an incredible ability to make mistakes.. That has been a constant in his political life, but age does not forgive, and has aggravated the problem. As the children of another powerful old man say, Rupert Murdoch (92 years old and has just broken off his wedding engagement with what would be his fifth wife), “being forty now is like being thirty, but being eighty is still like be eighty”.
Biden and Sánchez have some things in common. The two preside over governments based on fragmented coalitions. Within the Democratic Party there are, for example, Senators Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who could pose as Republicans without any problem.
And on the other side is Bernie Sanders, who ran for the White House in 2016 and 2020 and calls himself a “socialist” – a term that in the United States carries much more psychological weight, since it practically comes to mean “philo-communist”, not “social democrat” – or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a “socialist”, almost did not vote for Biden at the 2020 Democratic Convention, in which he was chosen as a candidate for the presidency, and who refused the last year to support an eventual candidacy for re-election.
On July 20 in Washington, the Minister of Labor – and current vice president and leader of Sumar – Yolanda Díaz praised Sanders as “a benchmark” for the left, despite the fact that many of his ideas place him in the the opposite of the entire foreign and security policy team -headed by the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and the National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan-, the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, or the Attorney General – a position that is equivalent to Minister of Justice in Spain – Merrick Garland.
A few hours before Pedro Sánchez arrived in Washington to meet with the President of the United States, Joe Biden, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, held a working breakfast with the representatives of seven large American companies, above all, the medical, pharmaceutical and financial sectors. There were also executives from companies with a presence in Spain, such as the automobile giant Ford, which has closed an agreement with the unions to reduce the workforce of its factory in Almussafes (Valencia) by almost 20%, which means the loss of 1,144 jobs, or the Kimberly-Clark paper mill, which has a factory in Salamanca where it produces personal hygiene items.
The best-known name among the attendees was Albert Bourla, president and CEO of Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company by turnover, which achieved considerable notoriety when the company he runs managed, with the German BioNTech, to develop the first vaccine against Covid-19. 19, on November 2020. Another president and CEO was Tom Polen, of the medical equipment manufacturing company BD. Most of the companies, however, were represented by their heads of government relations (General Electric, UPS, Morgan Stanley, and Citi) or of operations outside the United States (Dow, Ford, and Kimberly-Clark, as well as the representative of the Chamber of Commerce itself).
Albares took advantage of the breakfast to promote the image of the Spanish economy in the United States, one of the objectives of Pedro Sánchez. The president has tried to promote investment, especially from US technology and entertainment companies, and in 2020 he even made a trip to New York and California to meet with executives from those sectors.. On this trip, Pedro Sánchez will not have any meetings with company executives. Apart from his meeting with Biden, his only activities in Washington are the delivery of the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic to the former president of the House of Representatives, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, which took place last night at the Ambassador's Residence, Santiago Cabanas, and a meeting with the editorial board of The Washington Post, today just before his visit to the White House. By Pablo Pardo.