On the shores of Lake Geneva, in a landscape of spa hotels and mineral water, the leaders of the world's seven wealthiest nations will sit down this week for a three-day summit to argue about the global economy, artificial intelligence, and the future of a planet they no longer unambiguously run. Among them—invited, seated, and expected to speak—is Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.
For Egyptian officials, the invitation itself is significant; it is a “diplomatic triumph and a recognition of Egypt's strategic weight and reflects the exceptional level that Egyptian–French relations have reached in recent years.”
The G7 summit at Evian-les-Bains, running from 15 to 17 June, is the first time Egypt has attended such a gathering since Biarritz in 2019, also hosted by France, when El-Sisi appeared briefly in his capacity as chairperson of the African Union (AU). That visit was largely ceremonial, tied to an institutional role and focused on digital transformation and G7-Africa partnerships rather than a bilateral invitation.
This week is different. Egypt is invited as a “partner country” alongside Brazil, India, Kenya, and South Korea. Together with the title of “invitees,” Macron has also invited the leaders of Qatar and the UAE for specific sessions on the Middle East and global economic imbalances, alongside Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Saudi Arabia, whose invitation Macron had publicly floated, ultimately declined, a diplomatic detail that a diplomatic source noted without providing additional information.
“A grouping that tells its own story about how France's Emmanuel Macron, who holds the G7 rotating presidency this year, has chosen to reframe what this summit is and who it is for,” a diplomat in Paris told Ahram Online.
The G7 was born in 1975 in the château at Rambouillet, outside Paris, a response to the oil shock that followed the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war that liberated the occupied Sinai. The founding members, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Japan, and Italy, with Canada joining the following year, represented something close to the commanding heights of the global economy. At the time, those seven nations accounted for 62 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The arrangement was informal by design, just leaders talking frankly to one another.
Half a century later, the calculation has shifted dramatically. The G7's share of global GDP has fallen to roughly 44 percent, while the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and expanded later to Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, now represent 27 percent, up from less than 10 percent when the G7 was formed.
The world has not simply grown; it has rebalanced. And yet, the G7 has continued to act as though its consensus still speaks for the whole world.
Macron's response to this shift is an attempt to expand, not the membership, but the conversation. The Evian gathering is structured around the premise that the G7's real value in 2026 is not as an economic governing body but as a forum capable of convening both established powers and emerging ones to confront problems that neither can solve alone. The agenda reflects this: macroeconomic imbalances, North-South partnerships, AI governance, energy security, cancer research, drug trafficking, and the protection of children online.
Egypt's place in the architecture
In this approach, Egypt matters. The Suez Canal handles approximately 12 percent of global trade, and its continued operation is a matter of acute interest to every economy in the room. Egypt shares a border with the Gaza Strip and has served as the primary diplomatic conduit for ceasefire negotiations, which makes it indispensable to any Western power seeking an exit from the current regional catastrophe.
Egypt's formal schedule at the Evian Summit is concentrated over two days. On Tuesday, El-Sisi will join a working session over lunch focused on ending crises and ensuring stability in the Middle East. This is the session that Egyptian officials regard as their most significant platform of the summit.
The framing stability, crisis management, is precisely the language in which Egypt has come to define its regional role. Whether the crisis is Gaza following the Israeli genocidal war and endless rounds of talks to consolidate the ceasefire, the US-Israel war on Iran and the emerging agreement, the volatility of energy markets and commerce lanes in the wake of regional conflict, or where Israel's expansionist wars have grown, Egypt insists it is an indispensable interlocutor.
El-Sisi's interventions, according to sources familiar with his summit planning, will not take the form of formal addresses. “The format will take the form of interventions, conversational engagements rather than scripted speeches,” one source said.
Egyptian diplomatic sources indicate that the president is expected to raise the question of Middle East stability and the implications of regional conflict for global oil and gas supply.
On Wednesday, Egypt will participate in the session on balanced, shared, and sustainable economic growth, the summit's attempt to address what the French presidency has called “structural macroeconomic imbalances,” a phrase that aligns with Cairo’s language on the extent to which the global economy's distortions are creating pressure on the southern countries.
The Evian meeting is expected to focus also on the advancement of agreements around submarine electricity interconnection cables across the Mediterranean and green hydrogen production, infrastructure projects that align with Egypt's economic ambitions.
Beyond the formal sessions, it is the margins of the summit that may carry more immediate consequences.
El-Sisi is expected to hold bilateral meetings with US President Donald Trump and the chief executives of major technology companies, particularly those operating in the artificial intelligence sector.
“A Mediterranean summit, sub to the G7, a proposal that has circulated within the orbit of the Egyptian Embassy in Paris for some months, may also surface in these bilateral conversations,” according to the Paris source.
The idea, still tentative and requiring significant diplomatic groundwork, envisions a summit framework specifically for Mediterranean nations to address energy, migration, and development in a more tailored format than the G7's broad agenda allows.
Whether it progresses from diplomatic concept to concrete proposal will depend partly on the signals El-Sisi receives in Evian.
Cairo's aims in Evian are not difficult to read. Egypt wants the G7's collective endorsement of its role as the Arab world's essential stabilizer. El-Sisi arrives in Evian, leading an economy under significant strain. The domestic reform programme, undertaken partly under the terms of its relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is seeking significant foreign investments, and why not in renewable energy, logistics, and digital infrastructure?
The North-South partnership session is an opportunity to push, alongside other emerging economies, for a more flexible, more responsive set of instruments on debt restructuring, on climate finance, and on food security. But the most honest accounting is visibility and the possibility of momentum on specific bilateral deals.
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