European leaders will discuss the uncertainties facing Europe and the social democratic recipes to deal with them
The president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez will travel to Berlin this Friday to meet with the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the Portuguese Prime Minister, Anthony Costa, and reaffirm the joint commitment to energy interconnections and, specifically, the Midcat trans-Pyrenees, of which France is suspicious.
The meeting has been arranged on the occasion of the presence of the three leaders in the German capital to participate in the Congress of the European Socialist Partyin which Sánchez will intervene this Saturday.
The head of the Executive co-chaired with Scholz this month in A Coruña a bilateral summit in which they made a common front in favor of the MidCat and conspired to try to convince the French president, Emmanuel Macron, of the need for this gas interconnection and green hydrogen.
Both, along with Costa, will insist on the defense of this project in the European Council to be held in Brussels on October 20 and 21.
Before that date, another meeting of Sánchez and Costa with Macron is scheduled to take place in Paris, as agreed at the informal European summit last week in Prague.
“I will see Prime Minister Sánchez and Prime Minister Costa in a few days in Paris, and we are going to find very pragmatic agreements to threebecause this is how we will do things and how we do them well, in the European way, but France is in favor of interconnection and in favor of a united Europe,” Macron said in the Czech capital.
For his part, the President of the Government expressed his conviction that he will be able to reach an agreement “with a good friend and ally such as the French Government”.
In the meeting in Berlin, which will be held at the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry, in addition to the energy supply situation in the EU, other European and international political issues will also be discussed, such as the situation of the war in ukraine.
Sánchez will meet with Scholz just the day after the defense ministers of fourteen European NATO countries, in addition to Finland, signed a letter of intent for the development of a “European Sky Shield Initiative”a German-led project to protect Europe from missile attacks.
Neither Spain nor Portugal are among those countries, and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, explained that there has not been a request from Germany for it and that, if it were made, it would be studied.