The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has found himself once again in an uncomfortable protocol situation that he already experienced less than three months ago in Morocco. This time it was at the start of the NATO summit that is being held today and tomorrow in Madrid. The head of the Executive has intervened in the inauguration of the conclave, as the host country, with a small Spanish flag in front, but upside down, that is, with the shield facing downwards. When the president moved to his place as the Spanish representative, the flag was correctly placed.
NATO, through the Twitter account of its spokesperson, Oana Lungescu, has formally apologized to the Spanish Government for this "error" and the Executive has already accepted the apology after recalling that it is the Atlantic Alliance that is in charge of the organization and protocol of the summit.
"Due to an error, the Spanish flag was placed incorrectly at the start of the Summit. The error was corrected immediately, as can be seen in the photo.
It is nothing more than an anecdote, but one that is repeated in a very short period of time. At the beginning of April, Sánchez made a visit to Rabat to seal with the Moroccan king, Mohamed VI, a new stage of bilateral relations for which he accepted a change in relation to Western Sahara and recognized the Moroccan proposal of autonomy for the former colony as "the most serious realistic and credible basis" for the solution of the conflict.
Then the head of the Executive participated in the iftar - the end of the daily fast typical of the month of Ramadan in the Muslim world - with which the Alaouite king wanted to entertain the Spanish president. In a photograph posted on his Twitter account by the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which the monarch and Sánchez were, among others, it was striking that behind the chief executive the rojigualda flag was upside down.
Then, from La Moncloa, the error was attributed to an oversight and in no case to an intentional gesture by the Moroccan authorities, given the treatment they have given Sánchez on this visit to the neighboring country. However, the Moroccan authorities did not apologize, which raised some suspicions about his true intentions.
