Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico will have a working bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron next Thursday in Paris. Fico announced this on the social network Facebook on Friday, stating that the agenda of the interview will be “huge”, writes TASR.
The Prime Minister announced the meeting shortly after returning to Slovakia from a trip to Brussels and Paris. On Thursday evening, in the capital of Belgium, he took part in an extraordinary meeting of the European Council called by its president, António Costa, in connection with US President Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland.
According to Fico, the meeting was informal and did not bring any conclusions. “To state that we are interested in cooperation with the US, that we support the territorial integrity and integrity of Denmark and Greenland, and that we need to be stronger in order to resist the consequences of the new American foreign policy, a video conference was enough and we could have saved a lot of money,” stated. At the meeting, the leaders of the member states also addressed Ukraine, which, according to the head of the Slovak government, has taken a back seat under the influence of the American interest in acquiring Greenland.
Fico recalled that Ukrainian civilians are exposed to winter and power outages due to the war. In this context, he emphasized that the Slovak Republic delivered to Ukraine in January of this year twice as many emergency supplies of electricity than in the entire previous year and is ready to help Ukrainians by other means as well.
Fico subsequently moved from Brussels to Paris, where on Friday he visited the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) together with the Slovak Minister of Finance Ladislav Kamenický. They agreed with its representatives that they will jointly prepare a credible plan to support economic growth for Slovakia based on domestic resources.
„We agreed that together we will prepare a credible plan to support economic growth for Slovakia based on domestic resources, that together we will establish a strategy for how Slovakia should behave in a short period of time in the new quality of the geopolitical situation and how it should use the advantages obtained by a sovereign Slovak foreign policy oriented to all four parties in obtaining foreign investments and how to include this short-term plan in the prepared Vision and Strategy for the Development of Slovakia by 2040, on which the government started working intensively,” explained the Prime Minister. “I refuse to mindlessly consolidate and cut just to have nice numbers,” he declared.
According to the prime minister, the European Commission (EC) is unable to offer a meaningful plan to strengthen European competitiveness. He is also skeptical about the announced informal meeting of the European Council, which will take place on February 12. Namely from the EC he sees no interest to do something about high electricity prices, which have a significant impact on the Slovak and European economy.
