Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission’s first female president, was “surprised” after being left without a chair during a meeting of the EU’s two presidents and Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and has demanded such a snub is never repeated, according to The Guardian.
The awkward scene played out before a three-hour meeting with Erdoğan on Tuesday where one of the issues raised by the EU leaders was women’s rights in light of Turkey’s withdrawal from a convention on gender-based violence.
“The German head of the commission was left visibly irritated at the start of the talks in Ankara with her two male counterparts, Erdoğan and Charles Michel, the former Belgian prime minister who is president of the European council. “Ehm,” she muttered, with a small gesticulation directed at the occupied seats, as Michel and Erdoğan settled themselves at the head of the gilded room in the presidential complex at the start of the talks,” the agency reported.
After the meeting, von der Leyen did not explicitly mention the incident. But she expressed concern about Turkey's attitude to women's rights.
“We have come to Turkey to give our relationship a new momentum and in this respect, we had an interesting first meeting with President Erdoğan,” Von der Leyen said. She added Turkey had sent a “wrong signal” by leaving the convention on preventing violence against women signed in 2011.“I am deeply worried by the fact that Turkey withdraws from the Istanbul convention,” she said. “This is about protecting women and protecting children from the threat of violence”.
Regarding the incident, the European Commission stated that the protocol requires the same treatment of the presidents of the European Council and the Commission.The representative of the European Commission, Eric Mamer, noted that the protocol for the President of the European Commission is exactly the same as for the President of the European Council.
“The president expects that the institution that she represents to be treated with the required protocol and she has therefore asked her team to take all appropriate contacts in order to ensure that such an incident does not occur in the future,” Mamer said.