Former Catalan president Josep Tarradellas once said that in politics you can do anything except make a fool of yourself. It is true that he was speaking in times when political marketing was much less intense and those who practiced it did so without communication teams, image experts and the instant evaluations flashed by survey companies. But it is also true that, if it were not for the speed with which news and images spread nowadays, Spain's PM, Pedro Sánchez would now be telling us about the many issues he had addressed with the president of the United States, Joe Biden, in his short walk with him, which did not last for even 30 seconds.
Later we'll come back to the details of this very brief promenade. But in some distant corner of the Spanish government's political consciousness, someone must be aware of the maxim that one should always avoid looking silly. Seeing prime minister Sánchez cast as an extra in a corridor, trying to stand beside president Biden during a traverse of about 20 metres, after the long-awaited and announced meeting between the two was not held, is almost ridiculous. To subsequently say that, in that time, less than 30 seconds, they had addressed the military ties between the two countries, the situation in Latin America and the concern for the migration crisis in that region - and that, in addition, they had time for Sánchez to congratulate Biden on his progressive agenda and return to the great multilateral consensus in areas such as climate change - is to treat the public as idiots, as there is materially not even time for the enunciation of the issues.
The weight that Spain carries in the international sphere is perfectly reflected in this "walk opportunity", which substitutes the White House "photo opportunity" given to those who are not first-rank leaders but rather governors who might be described in the international jargon as regional figures as well as international businesspeople. Even Jordi Pujol got one of those in 1990 with then-president George H. W. Bush, who received him at the White House for six minutes. An eternity, if we take the chronometer in hand, and look at the Biden-Sánchez walk at NATO headquarters this Monday in Brussels.
It is not surprising that there is an on-going, desperate need to put Brand Spain on parade all round the world, in order to counter the image of a country which holds political prisoners, where fundamental rights are permanently violated, citizens of a certain ideology are persecuted and the police act violently toward members of the public who only wanted to vote. Next week, the Council of Europe will reprimand Spain; for the first time, European courts have returned parliamentary immunity to the pro-independence MEPs who lost it under pressure from the Spanish government, extradition warrants are now not worth the paper they are printed on and Spanish justice is being rapidly discredited in Europe. In this context, of course, even a little walk seems like a big deal.