King Felipe VI invites Sheinbaum, through Albares, to attend the Ibero-American Summit in Madrid

Eduardo González Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares delivered an invitation from King Felipe VI to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday, April 29, inviting her to attend the Ibero-American Summit in Madrid. According to sources at the Ministry, Albares met with Sheinbaum during her tour of Latin America and the Caribbean, which includes Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. During the meeting, the minister discussed the bilateral relationship between Spain and Mexico with the president and personally delivered the invitation from His Majesty the King to attend the Ibero-American Summit in Madrid. The Mexican president recently visited Spain to participate in the IV Meeting in Defense of Democracy and the Global Progressive Mobilization event, both held in Barcelona on April 18. On that occasion, she held a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. That was Sheinbaum's first visit to our country since the diplomatic crisis that erupted in October 2014 over the Mexican president's decision to exclude King Felipe VI from the guest list for her inauguration. The Spanish government called that decision "unacceptable" and announced it would not participate in the inauguration "at any level." Amid the controversy, Claudia Sheinbaum stated in a press release that the King had been excluded from the guest list because he had not responded to a letter from his predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, urging him to apologize for the Spanish conquest. The president-elect clarified that, on the other hand, Sánchez had been invited, and that she had spoken with him "about the matter." In a meeting with the media in New York, the Prime Minister declined to comment on this detail. The first major step towards détente occurred on October 31, 2025, when Albares himself recalled—during the inauguration of the exhibition “Half the World: Women in Indigenous Mexico” at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid—the “pain and injustice inflicted upon the indigenous peoples,” which “is also part of our shared history and we cannot deny or forget it.” Those words, which were discreetly praised by Sheinbaum, outraged the People's Party (PP), which demanded Albares' resignation “if he does not retract his statement immediately.” The next step came in mid-March, when the King acknowledged—precisely during a visit to the same exhibition, accompanied by the Mexican ambassador, Quirino Ordaz—that there was “much abuse” by the Spanish during the colonial period. Pedro Sánchez endorsed the Monarch's words “one hundred percent,” and the PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, simply expressed his “pride in the Spanish legacy.” The following day, Claudia Sheinbaum praised the “King’s gesture” and, around the same time, confirmed that Felipe VI had been invited to visit her country next June to attend the opening of the 2026 World Cup, although she specified that the invitation had been extended “to all countries with which Mexico has relations.”

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