Did no officials meet German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Doha airport when he arrived for a visit to Qatar? No, that's not true: Sultan bin Saad Al-Muraikhi, Qatar's minister of state for foreign affairs, arrived to receive him. However, Steinmeier waited at the exit of the plane for nearly half an hour.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on the TikTok account @bel.pravda on November 30, 2023. The on-screen caption read (translated from Russian to English by Lead Stories staff):
The President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was left to wait on the tarmac at the airport of Qatar for 30 minutes.
Not a single Qatari official came to meet him at the airport.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Dec 8 15:02:13 2023 UTC)
On November 29, 2023, the German president traveled to Doha on a working visit to meet with the Emir of Qatar and waited for almost 30 minutes after landing at the Qatari capital to be greeted. According to the article above by Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, the president's plane arrived early. A video of the German president standing at the exit of the plane went viral globally, for example here and here. Finally, Qatar's Al Muraikhi came to receive him.
On the same day, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Steinmeier discussed bilateral relations between the two countries and ways to strengthen and develop them.
