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, saying that the agenda of the conversation 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.
Fico on the results of the negotiations
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 save a lot of money,” he said.
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.
Slovak aid to Ukraine
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 twice as many emergency supplies of electricity to Ukraine in January of this year 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.
Plan for economic growth
“We agreed that we will jointly prepare a credible plan for supporting economic growth for Slovakia based on domestic sources, that we will jointly 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 on all four sides in attracting foreign investments and how to include this short-term plan in the prepared Vision and Strategy for the Development of Slovakia until 2040, on which the government has started intensively to work,” explained the prime minister. “I refuse to mindlessly consolidate and cut back 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. The EC does not see any interest in doing something about high electricity prices, which have a significant impact on the Slovak and European economy.
