The EU summit with the African Union, held this Thursday and Friday in Brussels, has been the scene of a new sexist incident. During the formal greetings with the African heads of state, on the first day this Thursday, the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, suffered a macho snub at the passivity of the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, who reminds a previous episode.
The incident has the potential to become a new sofa gatethat episode a year ago in which, during a visit to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, the President of the Commission was relegated to sitting on a sofa while the President of the Council occupied a chair next to the Turkish leader: Michel did not react then in the face of unequal treatment, and accusations of machismo haunt him to this day.
On this occasion, the protagonist has been the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uganda, Jeje Odongo, who during the protocol greeting and posing for the photo has passed by without shaking hands or saying a single word to Von der Leyen –le makes a slight gesture of greeting, almost imperceptible– and instead went directly to greet, with a strong handshake, and to talk with the two men who were accompanying the German woman at that time: Michel himself and the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
Faced with the rudeness, the President of the Council, who had the perfect opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past, remains silent and does nothing. It is Macron who invites the Ugandan to greet Von der Leyen. Finally, Odongo approaches the German leader, and briefly talks with her, but never shakes her hand. Later, the Ugandan published on social networks a photograph of the moment in which he was seen greeting only Macron and Michel, with the following message: “I was received by the President of the European Council and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron ”. No sign of Von der Leyen. The message was later deleted.
“I felt hurt and I felt alone, as a woman and as a European”, censured Von der Leyen in an appearance in the European Parliament in April last year, after the sofagate. The episode made clear the rivalry between the two visible heads of the European institutions, but the image of Ankara became above all the symbol of the unacceptable humiliations that many women still suffer daily in Europe. Michel’s new blunder also occurs just four months after the former Belgian prime minister has to renew his position as head of the Council, a process that he faces two and a half years after being elected.
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