Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/BARCELONA: At a joint summit with Spain on Thursday in Barcelona, French President Emmanuel Macron held talks with Pedro Sanchez of Spain to get Spanish support for its firm position against US protectionism.
The conference happens as France prepares for a disruptive countrywide strike over a disputed pension reform campaign, battening down the hatches for a “hellish” day of protest over proposals to raise the age from 62 to 64 for retirement.
Friendship treaty
After the talks, both leaders will sign a cooperation and friendship treaty reinforcing bilateral ties on migration, defense, and energy issues. With this treaty, Paris seeks to build stronger ties with neighbors other than Germany, notably those in southern Europe, when the Paris-Berlin partnership, which supports the EU unity, begins to show signs of strain.
Macron’s primary objective is to find “a united position with Madrid” over Europe’s response to Washington’s historic Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a significant investment scheme to expedite the US transition to renewable energy.
Europe fears the proposal, which will invest billions of dollars in environmentally friendly technologies, will hamper transatlantic trade and unfairly benefit American businesses. Macron vehemently condemned the subsidies as “extremely aggressive” during a visit to Washington in November to prevent European companies from moving to the US to take advantage of the subsidies, and wants Brussels to follow suit immediately.
However, the EU nations, so far, have been divided about their response to the IRA, with Macron’s hard-ball approach gaining little traction in Spain. Earlier this week, Sanchez admitted to talking to CNBC. In particular, Europe needed to reconsider its approach to subsidies “to convey a message to industry worldwide that Europe — and, of course, Spain — is a good location” to invest.
Although Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has shown a tendency for dialogue rather than conflict with Washington, the French president still seeks to enlist Olaf in his position.
Scholz is expected to visit Paris on Sunday to mark 60 years of the post-war-friendship treaty of Franco and German.
The Paris-Lisbon-Madrid agreement to construct a sizeable undersea hydrogen pipeline linking Barcelona and Marseille, which will be essential for the EU’s energy independence, was reached just three months before the Macron-Sanchez meeting.
Barcelona was chosen to hold the conference because, according to Isabel Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the Spanish government, it “would be at the center of this important initiative.”
Madrid also wishes to show that since separatists launched a failed attempt at independence in 2017, which resulted in Spain’s most prominent political crisis in decades, things have returned to normal in the northeastern Catalonia province. However, pro-independence organizations have vowed to go to the streets in large numbers to demonstrate against the summit.
