by Andreas Rinke and Belén Carreño
MADRID/BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is meeting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Madrid on Monday and the two men are expected to strive to find common ground on sensitive issues at national level. European Union, among which budgetary policy and immigration feature prominently.
Pedro Sanchez has high hopes for this first visit from the Social Democratic successor to Angela Merkel, with several sources explaining that he considers it a stage in the reconstruction of a Madrid-Berlin axis.
“Things were going well with the Merkel government but Scholz belongs to our social democratic family. There is greater ideological closeness,” a Spanish government source told Reuters.
Olaf Scholz and Pedro Sanchez, who are due to hold a joint press conference at 15:00 GMT, should use the occasion to promote a more equal distribution of refugees within the European Union, said Achim Post, the group’s general secretary. member of the European Parliament from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Madrid and Berlin had drifted apart since the 2020 debt crisis, during which Germany was perceived by Spaniards as one of the main “frugal” countries in the north of the EU, as opposed to the southern nations often referred to as “spendthrifts”.
For the Sanchez government, Olaf Scholz’s visit must therefore be the starting point for the rapprochement of these two blocs, said a senior Spanish government official.
“We will not abandon our agreements with Paris and Rome, which remain key partners,” he added.
Madrid hopes in particular to convince Berlin to support a relaxation of the rules of the European Stability and Growth Pact, suspended since the start of the coronavirus crisis, which would bring the deficit and debt targets to more “reasonable”.
The subject is also on the menu of the discussions of the finance ministers of the euro zone this Monday in Brussels.
(French version Marc Angrand, edited by Blandine Hénault)