Turkey has summoned Italy’s ambassador after his country’s prime minister called President Erdogan a “dictator”.
Mario Draghi’s comments were made while he was expressing support for Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who was not given a chair during a meeting this week with Erdogan and Charles Michel, the European Council president. Instead she was sidelined on a sofa.
Draghi said during a press conference in Rome that he “felt sorry for the humiliation” inflicted on von der Leyen. Michel was given a seat alongside Erdogan at the meeting in Ankara.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, posted a tweet that condemned “the unacceptable populist rhetoric of the appointed Italian Prime Minister Draghi and his ugly and unrelenting statements about our elected president”.
Cavusoglu said that the seating arrangements for the meeting had been approved by the EU’s teams in advance.
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Michel said during an interview on the Belgian TV channel Les News 24 that he deeply regretted what happened and called it a “disastrous image”.
The trip to Ankara by the two EU leaders was supposed to focus on resetting relations with Turkey. They were trying to agree on a refreshed set of guidelines for relations with Ankara, which were approved by EU leaders late last month.
The bloc wants to give more money to Turkey within the remit of a 2016 deal on migration. Under the proposal Ankara would host the four million Syrian refugees living in Turkey to prevent them crossing into Europe.
The talks were also to resolve the dispute over Turkey’s oil and gas exploration in waters belonging to Greece and Cyprus.
The dispute comes weeks after Turkey pulled out of the Istanbul Convention, a UN agreement to protect women from domestic violence.
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It is the second diplomatic embarrassment of the year that EU officials have suffered. Josep Borrell, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, was humiliated in Moscow in February. He was sitting in meetings with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, as European diplomats were being expelled.
