An economic summit turned into a meeting to establish the posture of the Twenty-Seven regarding the tensions between Israel and Iran. Iran's attack on Israel last weekend in response to an April 1 strike against its embassy in Damascus led the meeting's agenda.
It was decided that the start of the summit, on Wednesday evening, would be devoted to the situation in the Middle East, taking care not to put Ukraine in the background. The Europeans are far from being aligned with Israel; the 350 Iranian drones and missiles launched towards the Jewish state have had the effect of closing ranks. On Wednesday evening, they gave the political green light to new EU sanctions against Tehran, according to the line also defined by the G7. "We must adapt, extend sanctions against Iran," declared French President Emmanuel Macron. The summit was to be above all an economic summit devoted to the loss of competitiveness of the EU in the face of its competitors, led by the United States, and to the strategy to adopt to put the Union back in the saddle.