Politico: European Summit In Granada Ends In Deadlock

The third informal summit, which took place in Granada (Spain) between the European Union and the European Political Community (EPC), a platform created in 2022 for political and strategic discussions on the future of Europe, turned out to be a “total failure.” The European and world newspaper Politico writes about this in the article entitled “Shambles in Granada: Mega-gathering of European leaders ends with a whimper.”

The summit, presented by international media as “a great opportunity to find solutions to a series of conflicts in Europe and around the world actually came to nothing,” writes Politico.

This reason being is that some key politicians of the peace processes in the Balkans and the Caucasus, such as the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, did not want to participate in the Granada summit. On the eve of the summit, Erdogan announced a kind of “break” with the EU, “Turkey no longer expects anything from the European Union that has kept us behind closed doors for 40 years. We will no longer tolerate any new demands or conditions regarding Turkey’s EU accession process. We have fulfilled all the promises made to the EU, but they have fulfilled almost none of theirs,” said the Turkish President.

The summit’s failure even forced Spanish organizers to “cancel at the last minute a planned press conference that was supposed to be attended by some 700 journalists.” Spain, as the organizing country, did not want to comment on the sensational cancellation of the press conference, but the Politico newspaper of the German publishing group Axel Springer managed to interview a European diplomat, according to whom “statements for the press were almost unnecessary, as the participants failed to resolve any of the most important issues during the summit.”

“A summit gathering close to 50 European leaders, dozens of aides and legions of journalists ended as a damp squib when those gathered failed to make any significant progress to resolve conflicts on Europe’s doorstep — or any other regional issue,” the newspaper concluded.