Premier Fico Set to Meet French President Macron next Thursday (2)

Bratislava, 23 January (TASR) - I'll hold bilateral talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris next Thursday, 29 January, Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) posted on social media on Friday, adding that the agenda for the talks will be "enormous." The premier announced the meeting shortly after returning to Slovakia from trips to Brussels and Paris. On Thursday evening (22 January), he attended an extraordinary meeting of the European Council in the Belgian capital, convened by European Council President Antonio Costa in connection with US President Donald Trump's threats concerning Greenland. According to Fico, the meeting was informal and didn't produce any conclusions. "A video conference would have been sufficient to state that we're interested in cooperating with the US, that we support the territorial integrity of Denmark and Greenland, and that we must be stronger in order to withstand the consequences of the new US foreign policy, and we could have saved a lot of money," he said. At the meeting, the leaders of the member states also discussed Ukraine, which, according to the Slovak prime minister, has been pushed into the background by the American interest in acquiring Greenland. Fico pointed out that Ukrainian civilians are exposed to winter weather and power outages due to the war. In this context, he emphasised that in January of this year, Slovakia supplied Ukraine with twice as much emergency electricity as it did in the entire previous year and is prepared to help Ukrainians in other ways as well. The premier then moved from Brussels to Paris, where on Friday, together with Finance Minister Ladislav Kamenicky (Smer-SD), he visited the headquarters of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). They agreed with OECD representatives to jointly prepare a credible plan to support economic growth in Slovakia based on domestic resources. "We agreed that we'll jointly prepare a credible plan for Slovakia to support economic growth based on domestic resources, that we'll jointly set out a strategy on how Slovakia should behave in the new geopolitical situation in the short term and how it should use the advantages gained by Slovakia's sovereign foreign policy, which is oriented in all four cardinal directions, to attract foreign investment, and how to incorporate this short-term plan into the Vision and Strategy for the Development of Slovakia until 2040, on which the government has begun to work intensively," said the prime minister. "I refuse to consolidate and cut recklessly just to have nice numbers," he declared. According to the premier, the European Commission (EC) is unable to offer a meaningful plan to strengthen European competitiveness. He is also sceptical about the announced informal meeting of the European Council, which is scheduled to take place on 12 February. He sees no interest on the part of the EC in doing anything about high electricity prices, which have a significant impact on the Slovak and European economies. NOTE: This story has been extended to include the final three paragraphs. am