Christodoulides and Erdogan meet in Budapest

President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met in person in Budapest ahead of the European Political Community’s summit in Budapest on Thursday.

Christodoulides and Erdogan were pictured in conversation ahead of the event, before then Christodoulides was pictured with Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, and then being pictured sat down around a coffee table with Erdogan, Fidan, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and a member of Erdogan’s communications team.

Christodoulides’ meeting with Erdogan comes a day after Erdogan and Tatar both attended the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS) meeting in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, which was also attended by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

There, Erdogan had said “the Turkic world is responsible for a fair solution in Cyprus,” while Tatar’s attendance of the event drew the ire of the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell.

Thursday’s European Political Community meeting is set to be attended by most if not all of its 47 participating states, as well as high-ranking officials from the European Union, Nato, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe.

The meetings are set to centre on matters concerning Europe’s economic security and immigration, with Christodoulides set to speak about immigration in his intervention at the summit.

On Thursday evening, the 27 EU heads of government will attend an evening meal at the Hungarian parliament building, where they will discuss relations between the EU and the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election as president, as well as the ongoing situation in the Middle East.

They will then hold an informal European Council meeting on Friday, with the main topic of discussion set to be the future of European competitiveness, based on former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s report on the future of the European single market and former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s report on competitiveness.