Ode to ZP

This is José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain, staging his own particular protest at last week's NATO summit in Bucharest. José Luis finds these summits all a bit of a bore. He has important things to take care of at home, like the upsurge of ETA violence, cajoling moderate Catalan nationalists into forming a coalition with his socialist party, kickstarting the construction industry and more, but still he finds himself wasting three whole days chattering with NATO leaders about nothing. José Luis therefore chooses to let these boys do their playground thing, where the likes of Sarkozy and Gordon Brown try their hardest to be best pals with G. Bush, the no. 1 bully on this playground, while he takes care of more important matters. There is lots of sturdy back-patting and fake laughter going on in the background, of political leaders looking to escape from the really important things they should be dealing with. Brits are refusing to take Gordon Brown seriously, and the French stopped taking Sarko seriously ever since he focused more efforts on wooing Carla Bruni than quelling violence in Parisian suburbs, but still Gordon and Nicolas head off to Bucharest to discuss whether Macedonia schould be called Macedonia. In between photo ops and handshakes with the head boy of this redundant organisation, some Dutch boy called Jap the Hoop, leaders feel important and forget how useless they generally are in domestic politics.
These summits are a form of political escapism, and we should seriously cut back on them. There are way to many of them, according to José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who recently faced a belligerent Hugo Chavez at another one of these summits, the Ibero-American summit in Chile. After King Juan Carlos had told Chavez to shut up, José Luis took a moment to compose his thoughts, and you could see on his face how futile he thought it all was.
And again last week in Bucharest. Whilst his colleagues are all huddling up around Bush, wanting George to call them 'buddy', José Luis is catching up on some reading, going over important documents as he is about to embark on his second term in office.
Contrary to his fellow-leaders, José Luis is not the typical world leader that gets up in morning, and first reaches for the phone to call Angela Merkel to discuss what they should do about Burma. The world is littered with useless leaders who are defeated by the plethora of domestic problems they are facing, who shirk their true responsibilities and end up merely acting the role of world leader on stages such as the NATO summit.