The AU-EU Summit: resetting the continent-to-continent partnership

Erforth, Benedikt / Niels Keijzer
External Publications (2022)

published on blogs.die-gdi.de, 24.02.2022

Against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the summit convened Heads of State of 27 EU Member States and 40 of their African counterparts under the auspices of European Council President Charles Michel and Senegalese President and AU Chair Macky Sall. The summit was intended to bring about a new start of the partnership, originally coined by the EU as a “new alliance”, with the partners finally settling on a “renewed partnership”. The changed global context has meant that this new start took a fundamentally different shape than the “comprehensive strategy with Africa”, which the European Council and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, both identified as political priorities during the pre-pandemic time of 2019.