Healthy competition, cooperation for the future and solidarity as a guiding principle in various areas of cooperation between Slovenia and Poland

The competitiveness of Slovenian and Polish ski jumpers and the solidarity between them when it comes to tough challenges are a reflection of all that the cooperation between Poland and Slovenia also symbolises on many levels, namely healthy competition, cooperation for the future and solidarity.

Although Poland has been one of Slovenia's most important foreign trade partners for several years, both in terms of exports and imports, the prevailing view is that in both countries mutual business opportunities are still not as recognised as they should be.

The two countries are therefore keen to strengthen cooperation in areas ranging from the automotive industry, construction, tourism and energy security to digitalisation, artificial intelligence and cyber security.

Cyber threats and disinformation are one of the central threats of our time. President Pirc Musar emphasised that Slovenia wants to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure to foreign cyber-attacks and transfer knowledge to a vulnerable region – the Western Balkans. To this end, she pointed out that, together with our partner France, Slovenia had also set up a Western Balkans Cyber Capacity Centre. Cooperation with partner countries such as France as well as Poland and the transfer of knowledge in the field of building resilience against cyber attacks by malicious individuals or even countries are of great value to our country.

The President mentioned that in the context of the actions of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the European Commission also gave significant support to the achievement of Member States' objectives in the area of digitisation. Poland and Slovenia are both at the forefront of finding innovative approaches to new digital solutions and technologies.Today's meeting of the Presidents and economic delegations was therefore a good opportunity to explore new possibilities for mutual cooperation in this area, she highlighted. In the framework of the Forum, the Slovenian and Polish sides signed Memoranda of Understanding on cooperation in the field of business and digitalisation.

Later, the two Presidents met with the Slovenian and Polish ski jumping teams after the FIS Ski Jumping World Cup Qualification. On this occasion, the President of the Republic of Poland presented a national decoration to ski jumper Anže Lanišek, who at last year's end-of-season trophy and award ceremony paid tribute to Polish ski jumper Dawid Kubacki, who had to end his season early due to personal reasons.