• Foreign Albares is seen with Blinken with the agreement to welcome immigrants and the decontamination of Palomares in the background
  • Washington Trip Limits Sanchez's Visit to Biden Anticipating Agreements and Amid Criticism of Podemos

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 global 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 base.

Of course, the image of the US president pointing the finger at the Spaniard where he should sit at the 'summit' of the G20 in Osaka, in 2019, remains for history. But, leaving aside that we do not know what both were talking about, we must remember that such actions were normal for the then president of the United States. He reserved them neither for second-rate countries nor for political rivals. Anyone who wants to check it can see the video of Trump blocking the passage of Elizabeth II of England and not waiting for her while both reviewed the Royal Guard at Windsor Castle, in 2018.

Then came Biden, 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 sign of Versailles protocol. Biden walked down a corridor for twenty seconds while Sánchez spoke to him without deigning to look at him even once 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 ad nauseam that Sánchez was going to have "an informal meeting" with Biden.

Display of tune at the NATO Summit in Madrid last year. EFE

Moncloa insisted that nothing had happened. But just two months later Sánchez made a strange trip to New York and California in which he did not approach Washington and only met with mid-level executives of technology, entertainment and financial companies. It was a journey rather befitting a secretary of state or a minister, with the exception of two meetings. One, with Larry Fink, the CEO of the world's largest fund manager, 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 the entry of Sánchez into the headquarters of the company – a monstrous futuristic building in the shape of a doughnut – that the Spanish president was only accompanied by two bodyguards and an adviser, lest they try to steal the plans of the new iPhone. Sanchez, still hurt by Biden's coldness, agreed, in part because getting into Apple cost months of negotiation.

But, in the end, the courtship bore fruit at last year's NATO summit in Madrid, where the Spanish president reconciled definitively with Biden. The White House is well aware of the difficulties that Sánchez has in maintaining with his coalition partners his Atlanticist and pro-Ukraine Sanchez stance, and Moncloa has been able to use that to his advantage. The change of position towards the Sahara has also been well seen by Biden's team, which has lifted most of the trade sanctions imposed on Spain by Trump, although sometimes it has replaced them with legal formulas that make it almost as difficult to export certain Spanish products to the US, according to diplomatic sources. In any case, the romance is sealed I give, with a photo at a meeting in the White House in which there is really little to talk about, but which, no doubt by chance, occurs just the day that the electoral campaign begins in Spain.

Trump ordered Sánchez to sit at the 2019 Osaka summit.

For his taste for coups and presidentialism, it could be said that Sánchez is closer to Donald Trump than to Joe Biden. The US president hardly appears on television, and delegates most of his public announcements to his spokesmen. Perhaps it is, in part, due to age. Biden is 80 years old, has motor difficulties that make the White House try to make him walk in public as little as possible, and an incredible capacity 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, Rupert Murdoch (92 years old and just broke off the wedding engagement with what was to be his fifth wife), say, "being forty now is like being thirty before, but being eighty is still like being eighty."

Biden and Sanchez have a few things in common. Both preside over governments based on fragmented coalitions. Within the Democratic Party 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 competed for the White House in 2016 and 2020 and who calls himself a "socialist" – a term that in the United States has much more psychological load, since it practically means "philocommunist", not "social democrat" – or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a "socialist", was on the verge of not voting for Biden at the 2020 Democratic Convention. in which he was elected candidate for the presidency, and who refused 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 reference" of the left, despite the fact that many of his ideas place him in the antipodes of the entire foreign and security policy team -headed by the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, the Defense Minister, Lloyd Austin, and the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, or the attorney general -a position that comes to be equivalent to Minister of Justice in Spain- Merrick Garland.

  • Joe Biden
  • Pedro Sanchez
  • United States

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