Spanish ministers will attend meetings of the French government and vice versa as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed in a bilateral summit held in Barcelona on Thursday.
Macron and Sánchez relaunched the Franco-Spanish relation and signed a new Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the two countries, EURACTIV’s partner EFE reported.
Despite recent frictions on EU hot dossiers such as the Midcat gas pipeline, both leaders committed to reinforcing their cooperation in a particularly tense moment for Europe.
Spain will hold the presidency of the European Council in the second half of 2022, a new opportunity to reinforce relations between Madrid and other EU capitals.
Among a series of new initiatives to reinforce a revamped “Franco-Spanish axis”, ministers of both countries will take part in cabinet meetings in Paris and Madrid at least once every three months and on a rotating basis, the text of the agreement, as seen by EFE, reads.
In order to promote cooperation, other structured dialogues may be established that bring together one or more ministries, depending on the issues to be addressed and within the framework of their respective competencies.
The Treaty signed at the Barcelona summit is the second of its kind that Spain has established with another EU country. The first was concluded with Portugal in 2021.
However, unlike the Treaty signed with France, the pact with Lisbon does not include Spanish ministers taking part in meetings of the Portuguese government, and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Some 6,500 pro-independence Catalan activists demonstrated on Thursday in the area of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), where the Spanish-French summit was being held, a rally in which the leader of the Catalan pro-independence party Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC), Oriol Junqueras, was booed.
The pro-independence movement gathered in Barcelona to reaffirm –in their own words- that the Catalan sovereignty process goes ahead, as well as to denounce that there is no “normality” in Catalonia. The protest was co-organised by the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), EFE reported.
Moments before the start of the summit, the regional President of the Catalan Government (Generalitat), Pere Aragonès, reiterated in a brief informal conversation with Sánchez, that the pro-independence movement “has not ended” and assured Macron that “Catalonia wants to be a European (EU) partner.”
In May, Spain will hold municipal elections, which many view as the first litmus test for Sanchez’s governing coalition with left-wing Unidas Podemos.
After that, the parties will have to face the general election set for December next year, and the political row between Madrid and Catalonia is one of the ‘hot potatoes’ in the Iberian political arena.
(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.EURACTIV.es)
Source: euractiv.com
