Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, will make official visits to Romania and Poland this week with the main objective of preparing the bilateral summits with these two countries.
According to diplomatic sources, both visits will address various issues on the European agenda, such as the conference on the future of the EU, the Multiannual Financial Framework, the Recovery Fund, the joint response to COVID-19, the EU’s eastern neighbourhood and transatlantic relations. In addition, the minister and her counterparts from the two countries will discuss the preparation of the bilateral summits announced in the recently approved External Action Strategy 2021-2024, which, according to diplomatic sources, will take place in Spain during the first half of the year.
González Laya will travel to Romania on Wednesday, where, among other matters, she will address the negotiation of a memorandum of understanding to be approved during the bilateral summit and will discuss other bilateral political, economic and cultural issues. During her stay in Bucharest, which will coincide with the celebration of the 145th anniversary of diplomatic relations, the minister will hold a working breakfast with Spanish businessmen operating in the country and will be received by the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, and her Romanian counterpart, Bogdan Aurescu.
The holding of the first Spain-Romania Bilateral Summit was already discussed last October by the Secretary of State for the European Union, Juan González-Barba, during a working trip to Bucharest, during which the possible legal channels to facilitate dual nationality for Romanians residing in Spain, where they constitute one of the largest foreign communities in our country, were also discussed. The bilateral summit, according to the Ministry at the time, “would mean the launch of a Strategic Partnership between the two countries”, which would contribute to “increasing the frequency of high-level meetings”.
The minister will also travel to Poland on Thursday, where she will hold a “relevant” bilateral economic and trade agenda and will hold talks with the Polish authorities on preparations for the next bilateral summit, four years after the last meeting of this kind between the two countries.
In Warsaw, González Laya will also discuss the Multiannual Financial Framework and the Recovery Fund following the COVID-19 crisis, two issues that brought Poland to the forefront of the political debate a couple of months ago due to the threat by Poland and Hungary to block the agreement on the EU budget in response to the decision by the EU Member States and the European Parliament to make the disbursement of the Recovery Fund conditional on respect for the rule of law by the Member States.
For this reason, Juan González-Barba travelled to Warsaw on 3 December to convey to the Warsaw authorities the need for the agreement on the Multiannual Financial Framework and the Recovery Plan to be implemented “with the utmost speed” in order to avoid the “devastating socio-economic effects of the pandemic”.
Only a week later, European leaders approved an agreement between the German Presidency and the Hungarian and Polish governments guaranteeing that conditionality mechanisms related to respect for the rule of law would only be applied in an “impartial and non-discriminatory” manner and would not be used to put pressure on these two countries in other matters, such as migration policy. This decision finally made it possible to lift the veto of Hungary and Poland – both of which have been the subject of rule of law cases – on the EU budget.
