The Diplomat
King Philip VI and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will preside between today and tomorrow the VII Conference of Ambassadors, the first one entirely in person since 2008 and which will be focused on the preparation of the Spanish Presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year.
The Conference, which will be held at the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, will be inaugurated by Sánchez and closed by the King. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, convenor of the meeting.
The First Vice-President, Nadia Calviño, the Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, and several other ministers are also scheduled to speak. In addition, on this occasion, the European Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, will also speak.
The Secretaries of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno Bau; the European Union, Pascual Navarro; Latin America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, Juan Fernández Trigo; and International Cooperation, Pilar Cancela, will also take part in the meeting, as well as the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Luis Cuesta, and the Director of the AECID, Antón Leis.
On the second day, the ambassadors will be divided into working groups, according to their geographical area, to address the challenges and issues related to these areas with the relevant director general. A total of six such working groups are planned: Europe; Latin America and the Caribbean; North Africa and the Middle East; Africa; North America, Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific; and multilateral.
The ambassadors will also have the opportunity to meet with the director of the Foreign Service, María Hilda Jiménez, as well as with the director of Spaniards Abroad and Consular Affairs, Xavier Martí, with whom they will be able to discuss specific issues regarding their work, in the case of the latter on everything related to the granting of nationality under the new Law of Democratic Memory.
The meeting, which will bring together the 118 ambassadors and 11 permanent representatives in international organizations that Spain has in the world, has been possible after the decision of José Manuel Albares to recover, in person, the Ambassadors’ Conferences, which were started in 2001 and were interrupted over the years.
The Conference will serve to coordinate the strategic priorities of the foreign policy developed by the Government and will be focused on the preparation of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Spain is currently part of the troika of EU Presidencies, together with Sweden, which began on January 1, and Belgium, which will take over from Spain in the first half of 2024.
This is the first time that the Conference will be held entirely in person since 2008. In January 2021, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, convened the ambassadors for the VI Conference, but, due to the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic, only a few were able to come to Madrid and the rest had to follow the meetings by videoconference. In that last meeting, with a hybrid character (face-to-face and telematic) and held at Casa de América, the ambassadors were addressed by the King, Pedro Sánchez, the Vice-Presidents Nadia Calviño and Teresa Ribera, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs and other ministers, such as those of the Interior and Industry, Trade and Tourism.
The Ambassadors’ Conferences, a model that is carried out in many countries in our environment, began in 2001 with the Government of José María Aznar and for a time were held annually. In 2008, when José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was head of the Executive, they ceased to be held, among other reasons, because of the cost of transferring all the ambassadors to Spain at a time of economic crisis. González Laya convened the 2021 Conference with the intention of recovering the annual periodicity, but in 2022 the meeting was not convened.
