No US-EU summit in May

The US government has confirmed that President Barack Obama will not meet EU leaders in Madrid this spring as planned by Spain, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency.

Philip Gordon, the assistant secretary of state in charge of relations with Europe, told reporters in Washington yesterday (1 February) that Obama “never had on his schedule a trip for a spring US-EU summit” and that a summit in Spain “was not on his agenda in the first place”.

The two sides have held annual summits for two decades and this year’s meeting had been scheduled for 25 May. It remains listed for that date on the website of Spain’s presidency of the EU.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, told reporters in Brussels today that the EU would work with the US to find a “mutually agreeable date for the summit”.

“The president of the United States was here in Europe I don’t know how many times last year,” Barroso said. “It has happened before and it will happen again that exact timing of summits needs to be adapted to the heavy political schedules on one side or the other.”

Obama’s decision not to visit Spain in May is a blow to the Spanish government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Brussels is expected to be the location of the next summit, as the Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force in December, stipulates that summits with third countries held in Europe are to take place in Brussels rather than, as has traditionally been the case, in the country that holds the EU’s rotating presidency. Holding the EU-US summit in Madrid was seen as a transitional arrangement.