Two presidents visited Turkey. Only the person was offered a chair
If diplomacy is portion theatre, acted from meticulously crafted sets, then a protocol blunder this week turned a top-level go to by European Union leaders to Turkey into huge drama.
Whether simply by design or by oversight, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, was left awkwardly standing while her colleague Charles Michel, the president of the council representing the bloc’s 27 customers, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey took the simply two available seats between your EU and Turkish flags.
“Uhm …” von der Leyen was heard saying in a video as she stood, lingering, in the grand area in the Turkish presidential palace Tuesday while Michel and Erdogan settled within their gilded seats, flawlessly centred for a picture op.
Still standing up, she raised a questioning hands.
She finished up propped up by cushions on a aspect sofa several feet away, and lower than the two men. Adding even more insult to the faux pas, her placement was mirrored on the far side of the room by Turkey’s overseas minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, whom she outranks. Von der Leyen, who is president of the European Commission, and Michel, who heads the European Council, are of equal rank in the EU hierarchy.
“There’s grounds why protocol plans exist: to attempt to take the factor of atmospherics and drama out of the equation,” said Ian Lesser, the director of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. “These things are not likely to happen.”
Twitter users in Europe swiftly reacted with the hashtag #GiveHerASeat.” Many saw the moment mainly because symbolic of the cultural dissimilarities between Erdogan’s Turkey and europe, coming just days following the Turkish head withdrew his region from the Istanbul Convention, a good treaty that seeks to safeguard women from gender-driven violence.
If the incident was symbolic of Turkey’s poor record on women’s rights, in addition, it reflected the European Union’s inability to forge a united front in dealing with a region that is clearly a hugely important neighbour and a good candidate to become a person in the bloc.
After Michel declined to carefully turn the situation around by offering von der Leyen his seat, the institutions offered diverging views of what had happened and just why in a post-mortem on Wednesday.
Von der Leyen “must have been seated exactly very much the same as the president of the European Council and the Turkish president,” said her spokesman, Eric Mamer.
He added that von der Leyen, the first girl to hold that content, “expects the organization that she represents to be treated with the required protocol, and she's therefore asked her team to take all appropriate contacts so as to ensure that such an incident will not occur in the foreseeable future.”
Michel issued a statement late Wednesday night time, blaming Turkish officials’ “strict interpretation” of the guidelines of protocol for making “a distressing scenario: the differentiated, even reduced, treatment of the president of the European Commission.”
In a content on his official Facebook web page, Michel said that the impression that he had been “insensitive” was untrue, and that he previously continued with the meeting in order not to certainly not make matters worse by leading to a public scene.
Michel’s reaction, or perhaps lack thereof, was not lost about European legislators and observers. Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Dutch lawmaker in the European Parliament, tweeted images of Erdogan ending up in prior European Council and European Commission presidents, Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker, seated in similarly ceremonious arrangements next one to the other.
“As to why was @eucopresident silent?” she asked, tagging Michel’s official account handle.
Others wondered: Had it been a protocol mishap or an intended small, given Erdogan’s penchant for drama? Both are conceivable under his significantly autocratic guideline, Turkish analysts explained, though these were inclined to see it as an oversight.
“Both sides are to share the blame,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Turkey’s foreign ministry should have warned the presidency that both EU leaders act as co-chairs, she said, and EU officials must have corrected the mistake.
“The omission is a natural outcome of Erdogan living in an all-male political environment and the EU being intimidated by the Turkish president,” she added.
Either way, it came a “horrible time,” said Nigar Goksel, the most notable Turkey expert at the International Crisis Group, especially because of the new withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.
According to data collected by UN Ladies, the United Nations firm for women’s rights, 38% of Turkish women encounter violence from their partner at least once within their lifetime, and a lot more than 1 in 10 was subjected to domestic violence during the past 12 a few months. In the 2021 Global Gender Gap article, an twelve-monthly review by the World Economic Forum that addresses economics, politics, education and wellbeing, Turkey rated 133 among 156 countries.
The protocol fail in Tuesday’s assembly comes at an essential amount of time in Turkey’s relations with europe.
Lately, Turkey has emphasised a desire to boost relations with the bloc and revive its procedure for joining. The achieving was intended to build momentum in a romance that is fraught with disagreements recently on concerns like migration, maritime borders and customs arrangements.
“Whatever the realities on the protocol side, the incident clearly underscores the fact that Turkey was blind to the optics of how this would appear,” stated Lesser of the German Marshall Fund. Those optics, he added, “will only underscore the perception that Europe isn't on the same page when it comes to values, in terms of diversity, inclusion and gender equality.”
That point had not been lost in the offended party.
Von der Leyen “seized the opportunity to insist on the issues linked to women’s rights on the whole also to the Istanbul Convention in particular,” Mamer, her spokesman, said. “It could have been discussed certainly regardless, but definitely this sharpened her give attention to the issue.”
