Eduardo González
The National Art Museum of Barcelona hosts today the XXVII Spanish-French Summit, in which the two neighboring countries will raise their bilateral relations to the highest level through the new Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation and which will be politically marked by the institutional participation of the president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, and by the protest demonstrations called by the pro-independence supporters, including the leaders of his own party.
This is the first Spanish-French Summit to be held in Barcelona since the institutionalization of this type of meeting in 1987 and the second in Catalonia since the one held in Girona in 2006, in which José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Jacques Chirac participated. The organization of this edition corresponded to Spain, after the one held in 2021 in Montauban, near Toulouse. The last bilateral meeting on Spanish soil took place in Malaga in 2017, chaired by François Hollande and Mariano Rajoy.
The main course of this Summit will be the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the Spain and France, which was authorized this past Tuesday by the Council of Ministers and which will raise the level of bilateral relations to the highest possible level, comparable to the one Spain already has with Portugal since the Trujillo Summit in October 2021 and the one France has with Germany and Italy since Aachen in 1963 and Rome in 2021, respectively.
The Treaty, negotiated by the two governments in compliance with what was agreed in Montauban, foresees, among other novelties, the creation of a Franco-Spanish Defense and Security Council made up of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense, the development of a common framework for international relations, regular meetings between the Ministers of Economy, Industry, Connectivity and Tourism, the holding of an annual business and economic forum, the development of interconnections, the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, and the setting up of a border cooperation committee.
In addition, important issues on the European and bilateral agenda will be addressed during the Summit, such as energy and railway interconnections, the reform of the economic governance framework, the EU Migration and Asylum Pact, the reopening of the eight border crossings still closed by France for security reasons and, of course, support for Ukraine. The Summit will not address the H2Med energy interconnection project, the first great green corridor that will connect the Iberian Peninsula with France and the rest of Europe and that will be operational in 2030 (presented last December), but issues such as the Mediterranean Corridor or the reform of the electricity market are on the agenda, especially after France presented this week to Brussels a proposal that, according to Moncloa, is quite aligned with the one presented the previous week by Spain with the initial acquiescence of Germany.
Other bilateral agreements will also be signed in Barcelona, such as the Cooperation Treaty between the two countries on Defense (also approved on Tuesday), an amendment to the International Administrative Agreement on Education, a declaration of interests on cooperation and technical assistance in the field of social and solidarity economy, another declaration of interests between the Ministries of the Interior on training of security forces managers and a third declaration between the Ministries of Agriculture to strengthen support for Ukraine.
To address all these issues, the Summit will bring together, in addition to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, ten ministers from each country (in the case of Spain, the three vice-presidents of Economy, Labor and Ecological Transition and the heads of Foreign Affairs, Defense, Interior, Transport, Education, Agriculture and Culture). After the meetings between Sánchez and Macron and the separate meetings of each minister with his or her counterpart from the other country, the meeting will conclude with a plenary meeting from which a final declaration will be issued and with the usual joint press conference of the two leaders.
Catalonia
The Summit will follow the usual patterns in this type of meetings, including the invitation to the highest local and regional representatives of both the city and the host community, as already happened, for example, in the very recent Summits with Germany (in Galicia) or Romania (in the Valencian Community). However, the big difference in this case, which no one is unaware of and which the protagonists have not hesitated to recall, is that the meeting between Spain and France will be held in Catalonia in a very different political context to that of 17 years ago, when the Girona Summit took place.
It has already been officially announced that the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, as well as the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, will only attend the opening ceremonies of the meeting, first thing in the morning, and that, as usual in these cases, they will not participate in any other meeting of the Summit. This will inevitably include the presence of the Catalan president during the playing of the national anthems of the two countries.
In any case, Aragonès himself sent last week a letter to Pedro Sánchez in which he included a list of “recommendations” and issues that, in his opinion, should be addressed at the bilateral meeting, such as the official recognition of the Catalan language in European institutions, the recovery of the original route of the Mediterranean Corridor, support for the new Montpelier-Perpignan rail corridor or the promotion of the H2Med project for the transport of green hydrogen between Barcelona and Marseille.
The Government has not responded so far to this letter, but Moncloa sources indicated that most of the issues proposed by the Catalan President are already on the agenda of the Summit and that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has already defended repeatedly in European forums the official status of the Catalan language in the EU. The Government itself has committed itself to address this issue during the meetings of the dialogue table between Madrid and Catalonia and even sent last September a letter to the Presidency of the European Parliament to request the official status of the Catalan language.
In any case, the institutional presence of Aragonès at the Summit will have to coexist with the demonstration called by the pro-independence supporters in the vicinity of the enclosure, after the call made, via Twitter, by the former president of the Catalan Generalitat Carles Puigdemont in which he urged the Catalans to mobilize during the bilateral meeting “to defend the country from deluded undertakers”.
The Catalan president’s own party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), has already announced that it will lead the march with the presence of the formation’s president (and former vice president of the Generalitat, imprisoned after the 2017 pro-independence process), Oriol Junqueras, and other prominent members, such as the acting president of the Catalan Parliament, Alba Vergés; the spokeswoman, Marta Vilalta, or the former president of the autonomous Chamber Carme Forcadell. Meanwhile, other pro-independence formations have harshly criticized Aragonès for participating in the event, as is the case of Junts, whose secretary general, Jordi Turull, has assured that his party would not have participated in the Summit if it were still in the Government of Catalonia.
