Luis Ayllón
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayip Erdogan, will travel to Spain next week, to preside, together with the head of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, at the VIII Spanish-Turkish intergovernmental Summit, according to government sources telling The Diplomat.
The meeting, according to the same sources, will be held on Thursday, the 13th, and will have the participation of a large group of ministers from both countries.
Likewise, they pointed out that the summit will have important economic and business content and during its development several substantive agreements will be signed in different areas. Erdogan and Sánchez are scheduled to preside over the inauguration, at the BBVA headquarters, of a business meeting to which more than a hundred company executives from each of the countries have announced their attendance.
Sánchez and Erdogan spoke by telephone on May 27 to prepare for the summit, as reported by the President of the Spanish Government on his account on the social network Turkey.
Furthermore, in that conversation, both leaders commented on the situation in Gaza and Spain’s decision to approve the recognition of Palestine as a State the next day, a measure that Turkey supports. In fact, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hakan Fidan, was one of those who participated last Wednesday in the meeting held with Sánchez and the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares.
Turkey is one of the countries that has tried to act as a mediator between Israel and Hamas to try to stop the war in Gaza, but in recent times it has accentuated its criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, to the point that Erdogan has criticized it. of “vampire” and has assured that “Israel is not only a threat to Gaza, but to all of humanity.”
In any case, the Palestinian issue will be present in the conversations between Sánchez and Erdogan, although other international and bilateral issues will also be addressed, including the Turkish demand to join the European Union.
On March 24, Albares paid a visit to Turkey, in which he opted for the European Union to strengthen its dialogue with Turkey and clear its path towards accession by setting “clear milestones” for its completion. The minister reiterated that Spain supports Türkiye’s candidacy to enter the EU. The country has had candidate status since 1999 and began accession negotiations in 2005, although these have been paralyzed since 2018. His Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, acknowledged that “Spain has been one of the countries that has sincerely supported our accession process.” accession to the European Union from the beginning.”
Turkey has on several occasions expressed its displeasure over the reluctance of several EU partners to accept its membership in the community club and, in October of last year, Erdogan decided to express this discontent by not attending the Third Conference of the European Political Community, which It was held in Granada, within the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU and featured the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky.
During his visit to Ankara, Albares also reaffirmed the validity of the Alliance of Civilizations, the initiative that was jointly launched 20 years ago by Erdogan and the then president of the Spanish Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and of which Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Ángel Moratinos is Secretary General. According to Albares, the Alliance “is a meeting point, dialogue and reflection on the great challenges of our societies.”
The one on the 13th will be the eighth edition of the summits between Spain and Turkey, which began in 2009 and will be a continuation of the one that took place in November 2021, in Ankara. On that occasion it was decided to raise relations between the two countries to the level of Comprehensive Association, but the centerpiece was Erdogan’s announcement that Turkey hoped to increase defense cooperation with Spain, a NATO ally, by purchasing a aircraft carrier and also, possibly a submarine, through Navantia. His statement provoked protests from Greece, which summoned the Spanish ambassador in Athens and recalled, through a spokesperson, that “the Member States of the European Union are subject to the decisions of the Council of the European Union on matters related to relations.” with Turkey and the provocations and violations of international law of this country. Albares was forced to tour Greece and Cyprus, two countries that maintain a tense neighborly relationship with Turkey and consider it a kind of betrayal that Spain, a partner country in the European Union, has such close military ties with a Government like that of Ankara.
The purchase of the aircraft carrier did not materialize, since, although last January, Turkey announced that it would acquire this second aircraft carrier from Navantia, it finally seems that this is not going to be the case and that the Turkish authorities have chosen to develop their own project in shipyards of that country.
In any case, different aspects of the economic relations between Spain and Turkey will be present at the summit, a country in which there are 700 Spanish companies, with the notable presence of BBVA, through its subsidiary Garanti BBVA, and which has a hundred of companies with interests in Spain.
