ISTANBUL, Monday, May 11, 2026 (WNP): President of Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan met Queen Mathilde of Belgium at the Vahdettin Mansion on Monday and discussed bilateral relations as well as regional and global developments.<\/p>\n
During the meeting, President Erdo\u011fan said T\u00fcrkiye and Belgium possessed significant potential for cooperation in various sectors including trade, defence industry, energy and agriculture, adding that efforts to further strengthen bilateral relations would continue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Turkish president said recent developments in the region had once again highlighted the geopolitical importance of relations between T\u00fcrkiye and the European Union.<\/p>\n
He stressed that updating the Customs Union in line with current conditions was among the important areas requiring swift progress during the process leading to T\u00fcrkiye\u2019s full membership in the European Union.<\/p>\n
Erdo\u011fan also underlined that T\u00fcrkiye\u2019s participation in the European Union\u2019s defence initiatives would serve the mutual interests of all parties.<\/p>\n
Referring to T\u00fcrkiye\u2019s growing diplomatic role internationally, Erdo\u011fan said the country would host the NATO Leaders\u2019 Summit in Ankara on July 7-8 and COP31 from November 9 to 20 this year.<\/p>\n
The president further noted that green energy transition was one of the important areas of cooperation with Belgium and said T\u00fcrkiye ranked among Europe\u2019s leading countries in installed renewable energy capacity.<\/p>\n
During the meeting, Erdo\u011fan also expressed hope that Queen Mathilde\u2019s engagements with Turkish business circles would produce concrete outcomes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ISTANBUL, Monday, May 11, 2026 (WNP): President of Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan met Queen Mathilde of Belgium at the Vahdettin Mansion on Monday and discussed bilateral relations as well as regional and global developments. During the meeting, President Erdo\u011fan said T\u00fcrkiye and Belgium possessed significant potential for cooperation in various sectors including trade, defence industry, energy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12170,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thediplomat.com.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}