Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will head the VII High Level Meeting (RAN, by its Spanish acronym) between the two countries this Wednesday.
The meeting will be held in Turkish territory, specifically in Ankara, for the first time since February 2014, when the V Summit took place between the then Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, and the current president and then Turkish Prime Minister, Erdogan. The VI Summit took place in Madrid in April 2018.
According to Moncloa sources, the summit will be attended, in addition to Sánchez and Erdogan, by the Second Vice-President and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz; the Third Vice-President and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Rbera; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares; the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska; the Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto; and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, as well as their Turkish counterparts.
Up to six agreements on sports, renewable energy and energy efficiency, natural disaster management, polar science, water and labor are also scheduled to be signed. The summit will conclude with a joint statement highlighting the good state of bilateral declarations, joint support for the Alliance of Civilizations, the upcoming NATO Summit in Madrid – given that both countries are allies in the Alliance -, the search for a “positive agenda” in Turkey-EU relations and the need for both countries to recover the economic relations they had before the pandemic crisis, which peaked in 2019 with 13 billion euros in trade exchanges.
Apart from that, during the meeting between Sánchez and Erdogan, bilateral relations, especially trade and economic ones, and several international issues, such as the situation in Libya and Syria, the de-escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the relations between Turkey and the European Union will be addressed.
Pedro Sánchez and Recep Tayyip Erdogan already held a meeting last June in Brussels, during the NATO summit, in which both expressed their desire to hold this summit before the end of the year in Ankara. According to the government, the volume of trade exchanges between the two countries has declined during the pandemic, so the two presidents shared the “desire for it to recover as soon as possible” by holding the summit and a business forum. In that meeting, Erdogan thanked the Spanish government for maintaining the Patriot missiles on Turkish soil. Sanchez and Erdogan also held a bilateral meeting during the NATO summit in December 2019.
Apart from this, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, coincided last Wednesday in Geneva with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, during the inauguration of the new headquarters of the Alliance of Civilizations, an initiative promoted in 2004 by former Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero with the sponsorship, precisely, of Erdogan and in which Spain and Turkey continue to be its main political and financial supporters.
The meeting comes shortly after the EU managed to defuse what was presented as a new diplomatic crisis with Ankara, which began with Turkey’s decision to expel the ambassadors of Germany, Denmark, France, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Canada and the United States in retaliation for the signing of a statement calling for the release of the Turkish businessman and activist Osman Kavala, in custody for four years. The EU called this announcement “serious” and Erdogan decided to reverse his decision after the ambassadors were deemed to have rectified.
This diplomatic problem has joined other disagreements in recent months between the EU and Turkey, such as the unauthorized drilling by the Turkish authorities in the eastern Mediterranean, which was harshly condemned by Greece and Cyprus and led to the adoption of sanctions by the EU that were renewed just last week until November 2022.
Another important difference between Turkey and the EU is related to the eternal problem of Cyprus, whose territory has been divided since 1974 between a self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which has only been recognized by Ankara, and the Republic of Cyprus, a majority Greek-Cypriot entity, with its capital in Nicosia, which does have international recognition and even appears as a member state of the EU. Spain has reiterated on numerous occasions that the solution to the conflict between Turkey and Cyprus should be based on the parameters of the United Nations (which advocates a unification of the island as a bizonal and bicommunal state) and has advocated the adoption of confidence-building measures that do not prejudge the final solution and even allow for closer relations between Turkey and the EU.
