Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will represent Spain today at the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and combating anti-Semitism, which will take place in the Swedish town of Malmö and will be presided over by the King and Queen of Sweden.
According to Foreign Affairs sources informed The Diplomat, Albares will be the only Spanish representative at the inauguration of this meeting, which has been convened by the members of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an initiative founded in 1998 by the then Swedish Prime Minister, Göran Persson, to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust and to fulfill the commitments of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (the so-called Stockholm Declaration). Spain is one of 34 member states of this intergovernmental organization, which also includes Israel, Germany, Argentina, Canada and the United States.
The forum was convened by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in early 2020 and was scheduled for the end of last year, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, but the pandemic forced it to be postponed. Finally the meeting will be held today in Malmö and will be attended by King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, according to the Swedish Royal House.
The presence of Albares comes at a time of intensified contacts between Sweden and Spain, the two countries that will hold the rotating presidency of the EU throughout 2023, the Nordic country in the first half of the year and our country in the second. On September 27, the Minister of Foreign Affairs received the Swedish Minister for European Union Affairs, Hans Dahlgren, at the Palacio de Viana in Madrid, to coordinate the priorities of the two countries for both presidencies and to address issues such as strategic autonomy and the rule of law.
In addition, the King and Queen of Spain are scheduled to pay a state visit to Sweden at the end of November. The dates have not been officially announced by either of the two Royal Houses, but the 24th and 25th are being considered, according to reliable sources told The Diplomat. Sweden has recently resumed international visits and has already received the President of Germany. Now, Carl Gustaf and Silvia are preparing to receive the King and Queen of Spain, in a visit that will include official lunches, joint events and other activities usual in this type of visits.
Foreign Ministry sources could not specify what Albares’ agenda will be in Malmö, beyond his participation in the forum. However, it is possible that he will meet his counterpart, Ann Linde, with whom the previous minister, Arancha González Laya, met in Madrid in July 2020, in the midst of negotiations on the European recovery fund after the COVID-19 crisis, in the course of which Sweden was one of the four frugal countries (together with the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria) that opposed, with much less success than they would have liked, the desire of Spain, Italy and other countries to mutualize the European debt generated by the pandemic.
