Barcelona will host in the coming months, coinciding with the Spanish presidency of the Union this second semester of 2023, a dozen events, high-level meetings, conferences and seminars included in the program prepared by the acting Government of Pedro Sanchez The Catalan capital will be, after Madrid, the city that will host more activities from a very decentralized agenda, which foresees sectoral meetings in many Spanish provincial capitals.
The choice of Barcelona as the venue for a long series of meetings is not accidental. It obeys the interest of the City Council, and particularly of the new government of the socialist mayor Jaume Collboni, to once again place this city at the center of “Europeanist activism”, explains Pau Solanilla, commissioner of International Relations and Economic Promotion of the City Council.
At the last government committee of the Consistory, at the end of July, before the start of the holidays, a report was presented on the impact of the Spanish presidency of the EU in Barcelona. It frames the holding of this type of international meetings in Barcelona as a sample of the “institutional normality” that the minority government that emerged from the mayor’s investiture session on June 17 wants to imbue the Barcelona’s agenda after a long period marked by the instability associated with the attacks of August 2017, the pro-independence process and the limitation of activity imposed by the pandemic. Likewise, we want to correct the trend of the previous municipal mandate, in which, although it is true that Barcelona played an active role in several international forums, more dynamism was lacking in the relationship with community institutions.
“It’s time to exercise Barcelona’s European capital, not just to claim it,” points out the City Council’s head of international relations.
Once some meetings related to the field of health have been held, the European program in Barcelona for this semester begins the most intense period this week with the Forum of Universities for the Future of Europe. It will be followed by several meetings organized by the ministries of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Labor and Social Economy, Science and Innovation, Equality (a seminar on people of African descent and their recognition and rights, on November 2 and 3), Finance and Function Public and Health.
One of the highlights of this Barcelona program of the Spanish presidency of the European Union will be on September 21 and 22, with the informal meeting of the Ministers of Transport of the Twenty-seven, which will take place in the modernist complex of the hospital of Sant Pau.
Another important moment will be the 27th and 28th of November, with the celebration of the Regional Union for the Mediterranean, which aspires to relaunch an institution born of the so-called Barcelona process and which will be accompanied on the same days of the meeting in the Catalan capital of the 54 foreign ministers of the countries on both sides of the Mediterranean and a forum of mayors from the same region. Before that, on 8 November, with the support of Eurocities, the meeting of the presidency and the European mayors will take place.