The King does not participate directly in the sessions of the 32nd NATO Summit at the Ifema fairgrounds in Madrid, but he maintains a parallel agenda of meetings at the Zarzuela Palace, which he opened this morning with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
On Monday, Felipe VI already began this series of high-level meetings, within the framework of the summit, with the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell. After the meeting with Von der Leyen, the King will receive the president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, one of the countries attending a meeting of the Atlantic club for the first time, and the president of Finland, Sauli Väinämö Niinistö, a country to which NATO will invite Sweden to join after the agreement reached last minute on Tuesday for Turkey to lift the veto on the accession of both countries.
Von der Leyen arrived at the Zarzuela before 9:30 a.m., the time at which the audience with the King was scheduled, and she did so accompanied by her chief of staff, Bjoern Seibert, and her diplomatic advisor Fernando Andresen Guimaraes, who have also participated in the meeting, which was attended on behalf of the Government by the Secretary of State for the European Union, Pascual Navarro. On the table, the main issues of the relationship between NATO and the EU, in particular related to security. The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU and its president, in addition to deciding on the organization and political agenda of this high community body, also assigns portfolios to individual commissioners.
Other key issues in Spain's folder with the European Commission is the Next Generation EU recovery fund. This Monday, the European Commission gave the green light for Spain to receive a second tranche of 12,000 million euros from the post-pandemic recovery fund after verifying that it has undertaken the measures agreed for this disbursement, including labor reform and part of the pension. The disbursement of these 12,000 million, which must still be approved by the member states of the European Union within four weeks to become effective, is the largest of those planned for the entire life of the Spanish recovery plan and will be added to the advance of 9,000 million euros and the first ordinary payment of 10,000 million that Spain received in 2021. If it receives the definitive approval, the amount of resources from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism that Spain will have received will amount to 31,000 million euros.
