COMUNICATION
Angela Merkel, 14th Carlos V European Award
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The award ceremony will be held on the 14th of October, at the Royal Monastery of Yuste.
The jury of the 14th edition of the Carlos V European Award, granted by the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation, has decided to award the prize to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in “recognition of her long political career in the service of Europe, having been a strong supporter of the European integration process and of the important strategic role of Europe in the international scene”. This was announced today at a press conference by the General Director of External Action of the Regional Government of Extremadura and President of the Executive Committee of Yuste Foundation, Rosa Balas, along with the Director of Yuste Foundation, Juan Carlos Moreno.
Merkel becomes the third woman to receive the Carlos V European Award after the former president of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, who received the Carlos V European Award in 2008, and the promoter of the Erasmus programme, Sofia Corradi, who received the award in 2016. It is also the second time that the prize has been awarded to a Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany after Helmut Kohl in 2006.
The winner, after knowing about this award, has sent the Foundation a text of thanks and recognition to the institution: “It is a great honour to be this year’s recipient of the Carlos V European Award. I am very much looking forward to the presentation ceremony”, Merkel said.
The president of the Executive Committee stressed that the granting of the Award to Merkel coincides with her retirement as chancellor after sixteen years as head of the German government. “Merkel is a key figure to understand the history of Europe during these last lustra in which the continent and the world have faced great economic, social and humanitarian challenges; Brexit, where a country has left the community club for the first time, and finally, and the COVID-19 crisis, which has become the greatest and most serious challenge we could have ever imagined”, she said.
On the other hand, Balas affirmed that this time of crisis and restrictions has served to “become aware that being part of the European Union offers hope, because the Community institutions have activated mechanisms to be able to recover socially and economically”. In this sense, the Director General stated that Europe has taken a big step forward and as active citizens “we must row to bring those values of solidarity, freedom, equality and the defence of human rights that define the European project to a successful conclusion”.
The director of Yuste Foundation, for his part, explained that the solemn ceremony of the Carlos V European Award will be held on the 14th of October at the Royal Monastery of Yuste in an event presided over by His Majesty King Felipe VI, along with regional, national and international personalities.
Regarding the nominations received, Juan Carlos Moreno explained that the Foundation received 26 proposals from five countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Spain) and one from the American continent (Puerto Rico); the final number of eligible proposals received being 25, and 17 the number of nominees for this edition. In addition, he said, “125 letters of support have been received from Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the United States”. He also pointed out that since 2016, the award ceremony was set on the 9th of May, coinciding with the celebration of Europe Day, but the health crisis caused the administrative deadlines for the award of the prize to be delayed.
Together with the Carlos V European Award, the Foundation is launches ten Research and Mobility Grants for European Studies addressed to researchers from all over Europe who are preparing a doctoral thesis in any discipline of the human and social sciences. In this sense, the director of Yuste Foundation explained that “the grants are related to the figure of the winner, in such a way that the research topic is adapted to the curriculum of the recipient”. The grants have three objectives: to support the development of research on European topics; to generate a network of expert researchers at European level; and to encourage their mobility for participation in meetings. As for the selected researchers, they become part of the Euro-Ibero-American Network of Alumni of Yuste “which aims to exchange knowledge so that researchers can work together and study specific issues that affect the future of Europe and look for possible solutions to the problems that arise”, Juan Carlos Moreno recalled. More than 100 researchers from different countries are currently part of the Network, including Belgium, Brazil, Cuba, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Carlos V European Award
Since 1995, Yuste Foundation awards the Carlos V European Award in order to reward the work of individuals, initiatives, institutions, and projects that have stood out due to their commitment to the European Union or because of their contribution to enhancing Europe’s cultural, scientific or historical values.
The recipients of the award so far have been: Jacques Delors (1995); Wilfried Martens (1998); Felipe González (2000); Mikhail Gorbachev (2002); Jorge Sampaio (2004); Helmut Kohl (2006); Simone Veil (2008); Javier Solana (2011); José Manuel Durão Barroso (2014); Sofia Corradi (2016); Marcelino Oreja Aguirre (2017); Antonio Tajani (2018) and the project “Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe” (2019).
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