Some scenes are so awkward to watch that they really shouldn’t be shown without a warning: “Contains appalling awkwardness.” Footage of a photo lineup at an EU summit last week was a case in point. Croatia’s foreign minister, Gordan Grlić-Radman, is shaking hands with his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, and leans forward to kiss her. She kind of turns away and this brief but harrowing pantomime concludes with a discordant peck on her right cheek.
The kisser acknowledged it was awkward and said it was merely “a human approach”; the Croatian women’s rights activist Rada Borić described the move as “highly inappropriate”; the kissee, Frau Baerbock, has to my knowledge passed no comment. And the whole sorry incident seems to have been forgotten.
