Cop29 will open this Monday, November 11 and should last at least until November 22. It will bring together 198 countries in Baku, Azerbaijan. Although many heads of state will make the trip, this will not be the case for Emmanuel Macron. And the French Minister of Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher will only participate in the conference from November 20 to 24.
The choice of Azerbaijan rather than Armenia to host the event is not unrelated.
“Complicated” relations with Azerbaijan
The French Minister for Ecological Transition would have preferred that Cop29 “not be held in Baku”, in Azerbaijan, declared Agnès Pannier-Runacher this Wednesday in the Senate.
She responded to a question from environmentalist senator Yannick Jadot, asking him to “boycott (Cop29) for the climate, for the Armenians and for human rights”, while a border conflict opposes Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“We have complex, complicated, diplomatically speaking, relations with Azerbaijan, and there will be no event involving French officials that would in any way highlight this or that element of Azeri policy,” then explained the minister before the Senate Committee on Regional Planning and Sustainable Development.
“There will also be no contact with the Azeri authorities that is not related to the Cop,” she said.
“No French leader will participate in the high-level segment, this is the first time since the Paris agreement” in 2015, said Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
Emmanuel Macron will therefore not take part in the summit which brings together heads of state and government on November 12 and 13. Around a hundred of them are expected, according to organizers.
France will “not play the empty chair policy”
“But we will not play the politics of the empty chair because that is playing the politics of our opponents, because it leaves room for those who could push for an agreement against the climate, for fossil fuels, against “Europe and against France,” continued Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
“It is up to us to wear the colors of the Paris agreement,” the minister also argued, while the newly elected American president, Donald Trump, could withdraw the United States from it.
“The Cop is a multilateral UN negotiation which is the only negotiation (in) relation to the climate which brings together all the countries of the world,” she further underlined.
As a reminder, the President of the Republic did not participate in 2018 and 2019 in the Cop24 in Poland and the Cop25 in Spain.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will not go to Baku either but, in his case, it is the political crisis in Germany, after the breakup of its fragile government coalition, which is disrupting his agenda.
Conversely, for the first time, Afghanistan will be present at a Cop. A first since the return to power of the Taliban government in 2021, recognized by no state in the world but which pleads to be associated with international discussions on the climate.
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