What brought the EU-28 together during the last semester as Brexit talks, consolidating the way Europe’s heads of state and government take decisions, is now over.
The persisting dispute of the refugee issues despite long-standing talks of the EU-28 leaders at Thursday’s EU Summit dinner during the first day of the European Council in Brussels, was not solved.
Key to the solution of the problem would be to bring three of the four Visegrad countries, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary at the same side of the table, as they continue to stubbornly refuse to relocate a single refugee, two years now, as long as the relocation programme with the mandatory quotas has been agreed by the EU-28.
The attitude of these three countries has outraged many European leaders, not only from the Southern member states, as the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, suggested the attitude of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is “shameful”.
The inability of the rest of the EU countries to bring the tree on the same side leaves the forthcoming Bulgarian presidency with the task of continuing with negotiations before the time of the final decision comes at the end of June. The last resort of the EU leaders would be to decide with a qualified majority, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday night.. EU leaders, however, will make great efforts to prevent this last resort as it will be a serious blow to the unity of the bloc.
But it was not the use Summit of the year that triggered the split. German Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to fellow leaders at loggerheads over how to cope with migrants from across the Mediterranean, even before the two-day Summit was to begin. “We don’t just need solidarity on controlling and steering migration on our external borders,” Merkel told Brussels press corps on her arrival. “We also need internal solidarity. There cannot be selective solidarity among EU members.”
“Today and tomorrow we will also deal with issues where a lack of unity is very visible and as you know I am talking about the European monetary union and migration,” said Donald Tusk, European Council President, as divisions seemed more than evident, between frontline countries like Italy and Greece that feel abandoned by the rest of the bloc, and central and eastern nations that are back on the table after Tusk’s draft note that accompanied the European Council president’s letter to the leaders, a few days before the Summit. It was there were Tusk branded mandatory resettlement quotas for migrants “ineffective”, causing the rage of European Commissioner Avramopoulos on behalf of the EU executive, calling Tusk’s stance “anti-European”.
“We believe that closures are wrong, walls are wrong and that so-called obligatory resettlement quotas are the minimum for the EU,” said the Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni. “These countries legitimately have a very, very distant opinion, they are countries which close their borders,” he added as a pre-summit meeting between Italy and Visegrad group countries with Juncker only agreed to contribute €36 million to a European fund to reinforce the migration control mechanism, focusing on migrant flows through Libya.