The Egyptian President multiplies contacts to prepare the conference of the parties on climate change, while his French counterpart seeks to weigh more in the Middle East.
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The visit was announced the day before without fanfare or trumpet: the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, was at the Elysée, Friday, July 22. He first spoke with Emmanuel Macron head-to-head, before a lunch extended to their entourage.
Their appointment has been the first since the re-election of the Head of State, anxious to always tighten the links with his counterpart, to better weigh in the region. For his part, Mr. Al-Sissi, who arrived from Berlin and Belgrade, multiplies the contacts to prepare the COP27, which his country welcomes in November, to fight against global warming.
The visit is part of a series of interviews in Paris with various leaders of the Middle East, since the passage of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yaïr Lapid, on July 5. The Head of State also received, Monday, July 18, the president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed Ben Zayed Al Nahyane. He had lunch on Wednesday with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, a few days after a meeting between this one and the American president, Joe Biden, in Bethlehem, July 15.
Each time, it is, in the context of the war in Ukraine which has grabbed Europeans for five months, to approach the impact of the conflict, in particular on the food and energy levels. Egypt is thus very dependent on its imports of cereals from Ukraine, and could benefit from the release of the ports of the Black Sea, if the agreement in this sense between Moscow and kyiv, signed Friday in Istanbul, is well L by work.
worry about the fate of Alaa Abdel Fattah
The idea is also to avoid a new escalation in the region, in particular in the event of failure of negotiations on Iranian nuclear, which has been stalking for months, Tehran and Washington failing to get along on final blocking points. The head of French diplomacy, Catherine Colonna, warned on this subject that “time was counted”, as the Iranians multiply “the dilatory maneuvers”, at the risk of emptying its substance the project of compromise on the table since February.
With his Egyptian counterpart, as with Mohammed Ben Zayed, Mr. Macron spoke of the idea of organizing, if possible by the end of the year, a new regional conference on the model of that of Baghdad In August 2021. The meeting had made it possible to sit at the same table of Iranian and Saudi representatives, in an attempted de -escalation between the two rival powers. “Many managers in the region have appreciated the format and are ready to do it again,” they say at the Elysée.
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