Seating Plan for a Pope’s Funeral – It’s Complicated, or Compliqué

Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)
Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)
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Seating Plan for a Pope’s Funeral – It’s Complicated, or Compliqué

Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)
Police officers patrol as visitors queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica of the Vatican, viewed in the background, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, in Rome on April 25, 2025. (AFP)

They may be the most powerful people on earth, but for the seating arrangement at Pope Francis' funeral on Saturday, all foreign leaders will play second fiddle to the Argentines and Italians and surrender to the whims of the French alphabet.

About 130 foreign delegations had so far expressed their desire to attend the funeral, the Vatican said on Friday, and more were expected to do so throughout the day. Those include around 50 heads of state who have been confirmed as attending, among them US President Donald Trump and 10 reigning monarchs.

Apart from the VIPs, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the funeral in St. Peter's Square, which starts at 10 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Saturday. Italian police have laid on one of the most complex security operations in decades.

The official delegations will sit at a section to the right of the altar at the top of the steps leading toward St. Peter's Basilica.

Pride of place goes to Argentina, Francis' native country, whose president, Javier Milei, will sit in the front row. Milei, a maverick right-wing libertarian, had heaped insults on Francis while he was campaigning in 2023, calling him an "imbecile who defends social justice". But the president shifted his tone after he took office that year.

Next comes Italy, the country that surrounds the Vatican and which agreed in 1929 to recognize its sovereignty as the world's smallest state. It gets the second-best seats in the VIP section also because the pope is bishop of Rome and primate of the Catholic bishops of Italy.

That is when the alphabet in French – still considered the language of diplomacy – kicks in for the other delegations. The countries following Italy are ordered according to their names in French and not in their native languages.

So, it is Etats Unis and not United States, Allemagne instead of Deutschland (Germany), and Pays-Bas instead of Nederland (The Netherlands).

Royalty will take precedence. Reigning monarchs -- expected to include royalty such as the kings and queens of Spain and Belgium and Prince Albert of Monaco -- will be seated in front of other heads of state.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said on Friday that no distinction would be made between Catholic and non-Catholic royalty for the seating order. After the royals come the remaining heads of state. Trump, who attracted criticism from Francis because of his immigration policies, will sit ahead of many other leaders because Etats Unis begins with an "E".

That alphabetic logic means that Trump - currently engaged in trying to get a peace deal in the war in Ukraine - will not be sitting near Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Former US President Joe Biden, who has been the target of constant criticism by Trump, is attending the funeral, but will not be part of the official US delegation, a diplomatic source said. This means Biden, a lifelong Catholic, should be sitting further back, with other VIPs.



Kurdish-Turkish Settlement: Shaping a New Middle East

Tulay Hatimogulları speaks at a press conference. Asharq Al-Awsat file photo
Tulay Hatimogulları speaks at a press conference. Asharq Al-Awsat file photo
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Kurdish-Turkish Settlement: Shaping a New Middle East

Tulay Hatimogulları speaks at a press conference. Asharq Al-Awsat file photo
Tulay Hatimogulları speaks at a press conference. Asharq Al-Awsat file photo

A string of pivotal developments in recent months has forged new and unprecedented dynamics - mainly related to the Kurdish cause - across the region.

The collapse of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8 shifted the calculations of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), pushing them to break their isolation from Iraqi Kurdish factions.

Simultaneously, an overture by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan, who called for the disarmament of his group, opened communication channels between Türkiye’s Kurds and their counterparts in Iraq and Syria.

At the heart of this political transformation is Tulay Hatimogulları, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM). A leftist Turkish politician of Arab Alawite origin, she embodies the complex identities of the Levant and its interconnected communities.

With her modest charisma and approachable style, Hatimogulları rarely turns down a request for a photo or a chat from her Kurdish supporters. An Asharq Al-Awsat correspondent met her in Diyarbakir—known to Kurds as Amed—shortly after her arrival from Ankara.

She was quick to tell them, in fluent Arabic, that she hails from Iskenderun, a region that was part of the autonomous Syrian district of Alexandretta under French control from 1921 until its controversial annexation by Türkiye in 1939, following a disputed referendum and the displacement of many of its original inhabitants.

Hatimogulları comes from a family of Arab Alawites who remained in the area. Today, she stands out as one of the few Turkish politicians capable of mediating between Ankara and the PKK at what many view as a potentially historic moment.

On February 27, Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence in the island prison of İmralı in the Sea of Marmara, issued a call for the PKK to lay down its arms and disband. His message was relayed by DEM party representatives who met him in prison. Ocalan was captured by Turkish special forces in Kenya in February 1999, and since then, most PKK fighters have been based in the mountainous regions of northern Iraq.

Ocalan’s call came after a statement last October by Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key ally of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Türkiye’s parliament. Bahçeli proposed a deal to free Ocalan in exchange for the PKK’s cessation of its insurgency.

Hatimogulları, speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat, explained that “with the PKK’s announcement of plans to hold a disarmament conference, it is essential that military operations and airstrikes cease. Additionally, the necessary technical and logistical infrastructure must be established to enable direct communication between Ocalan and the PKK.”

The potential developments between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ocalan could have significant repercussions across the Middle East, with signs of these effects already beginning to emerge.

Both Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and Nechirvan Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, sent representatives to attend Nowruz celebrations in Amed (Diyarbakir).

During their visit, they met with officials from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (HDP). In turn, the HDP sent representatives to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in February to discuss the peace initiative. There, they held talks with officials from the Barzani-led KDP and the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), BafelTalabani.