Pedro Sánchez and Joe Biden, this Wednesday AP / AFP
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, and the head of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, will hold an interview next Monday in Brussels on the margins of the NATO summit.
It will be "a conversation" and not a mere formal greeting, Spanish government sources emphasize.
The Moncloa and the White House have maintained contacts in recent days so that the first meeting between the two leaders (Biden and Sánchez have never cooperated) was not limited to a greeting, but rather a conversation in which both knew each other. and build bridges. Although the agenda is not closed, in all probability the interview will talk about the role that Spain wants to acquire in NATO and the trip that the Spanish president is making these days to Central America.
Spain has offered to host the summit that the Atlantic Alliance plans to hold in 2022, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of its entry into the organization, in May 1982, with the Government of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo. If the offer goes ahead, and the reception has been quite favorable so far, the US president and the remaining 29 NATO heads of state and government will visit Spain next year.
The fact that Biden had not telephoned Sánchez since he arrived at the White House on January 20, while he has done so with some thirty political leaders, had been interpreted as a show of disdain by the US president for Spain. .
Sources from the US Embassy in Madrid indicated that there is no "protocol" on the calls that a new president must make after taking office and that, if he had not telephoned the Spanish president, it is because "there is no problem that would make it necessary" .
Spanish diplomatic sources indicated, for their part, that Biden is focused on the domestic agenda and has only spoken with two EU leaders (Angela Merkel of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France), while he has not done so with Italian Mario Draghi. , which is part of the G-7.
The fact that Biden has reserved a gap in his agenda to talk with Sánchez during his first European tour denies, in the opinion of the sources consulted, the alleged disinterest of the new US president in Spain. In addition to participating in the G-7 summits in Cornwall (United Kingdom), NATO and the EU-United States, the latter two in Brussels, the White House has only confirmed the president's interviews with his hosts (the British Boris Johnson, the Belgian, Alexander de Croo and the Swiss Guy Parmelin, as well as the kings Elizabeth of England and Felipe of Belgium) and with the Turkish president Recep Tayipp Erdogan, as well as with the Russian Vladimir Putin, with whom he will meet in Geneva (Switzerland) .
