Merkel To Skip Banquet In Erdogan's Honor - Reports

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th September, 2018) German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not go to a state banquet in Berlin to honor visiting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, local media reported Monday.

The glamorous event at Bellevue palace will be hosted by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, with a hundred hand-picked guests in attendance, sources told the Spiegel magazine.

There is no telling if Merkel's reluctance to attend is a political gesture, the outlet said. She is invited to all formal dinners at Bellevue but tends to pick the most important ones.

Last time the chancellor came to the state dinner to meet the British queen in 2015, and five years before it was a state visit by the emir of Qatar.

Erdogan's trip to Berlin on September 27-29 bears all the trappings of a state visit, with obligatory military honors and the banquet, which raised a lot of eyebrows among Merkel's coalition partners and the opposition, considering a deep rift between the two countries.