GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN /Germany/ , June 7 /TASS/. The G7 summit will open in the Elmau Palace, located to the south of Munich in Bavarian Alps, on Sunday. At the invitation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the gathering in Bavaria will be attended by U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Canadian Premier Steven Harper and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Jean Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, and European Council President Donald Tusk will represent European institutions at the G7 summit. The heads of several international organizations, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki moon and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, have also been invited to the Elmau Palace.
Russia quitted this informal club in March 2014 when the G8 was reduced to G7 against the background of the Ukraine crisis and Moscow’s worsening relations with the West. Initially, Chancellor Merkel said that the G7 summit had outlived itself. Later, representatives of the Germany government took a different approach. They started calling G7 an association of co unties with "common values", which Russia allegedly does not share.
The question which German politicians have been asking in recent days is whether a summit can be useful without such a vital international player like Russia. The former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt (1974-1982), has expressed his skepticism.
"I have limited expectations," he said. Schmidt, 96, said he would be satisfied with the summit’s results if its participants would at least avoid "adding fuel to the fire."
Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005) shares this view. "I believe it’s a mistake that the Russian president has not been invited to the summit. When stances differ, it is necessary to discuss these differences. That could have been done at the summit," Schroeder said adding he was convinced that Europe’s future could only be with Russia.
Ralph Stegner, the vice-chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, said that global processes could not be run without Russia. The politician criticized the phrase about "common values." "It’s not a meeting over a cup of coffee," he said. "If the Western countries have a desire to hold meetings only with those who share common values, then they will find it hard to assemble enough people even for the G2 format," Stegner said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier changed their rhetoric slightly shortly before the summit. They stressed that the West needed Russia for resolving global problems and that the G8 could certainly be an excellent floor for fulfilling those tasks. But it is impossible to imagine the expansion of this informal club so far, they said. Steinmeier noted that the return to G8 would have made many things simpler and it would be good if Russia worked in that direction.
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