EU 'mini-summit' on migration gives Merkel and Macron no respite from domestic woes
Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the European Union’s two most influential leaders, met yesterday with their bitterly divided counterparts for a frustrating “mini-summit” in Brussels, while facing plunging popularity at home.
The German chancellor, whose political future is under threat unless she can wrest deals from her opposite numbers in Europe, had already conceded the mini-summit of 16 nations would not bridge huge splits over migration policy ahead of a full European Council meeting next week.
Italy's new hardline government has refused to admit foreign-flagged rescue ships packed with hundreds of migrants and pledged not to take in one more asylum seeker.
On Sunday in Brussels, Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister, slapped the richer northern EU countries with a ten-point list of demands.
Rome called for migrant "protection centres" to be set up in several EU countries to relieve overcrowding in its facilities and demanded more aid for African countries that fight human trafficking.
It also called for countries refusing to take their share of migrants under a controversial quota scheme to lose EU funding.
The document warned that the future of the EU’s cherished passport-free Schengen zone was at stake.
Q&A | Dublin Regulation
Before the summit Italy branded Mr Macron “public enemy number one” after the French president said there was no "crisis" of migration in Italy because migrant boat arrivals are down about 80 per cent compared to last year.
There has been a sharp decrease in migrant arrivals since their peak in 2015, when more than one million Syrians entered the bloc.
EU cooperation deals with Turkey and Libya, the main transit countries have sharply cut the flow of migrants. In Brussels, Mr Macron said “It's a political crisis mainly now.”
Italy and Austria have joined the four Visegrad countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which boycotted the mini-summit, in attacking Brussels’ handling of the crisis.
After the summit the leaders of Belgium and Malta said some progress could be possible at Thursday's full 28-nation summit.
However, Mrs Merkel appeared resigned to pursuing bilateral migrant return agreements with individual countries rather than a common European solution.
“Regarding the question: can we get bilateral and trilateral agreements in the coming days, this meeting is very important," she told reporters in Brussels.
Germans are turning against Mrs Merkel's warring conservative union, which currently has its lowest approval rates since last November according to a poll published Sunday in Bild.
Profile | Emmanuel Macron
The same poll showed that the far-Right, anti-immigrant AfD reached its highest score ever, with 16 per cent. Her interior minister Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CSU, has given her until the end of June to find a European deal to curb new arrivals.
If that fails, he vowed to order border police to turn back migrants, which means Mrs Merkel would be forced to back him or sack him. If she sacks him, her government could fall.
Markus Soder, the CSU prime minister of the German state of Bavaria, said Sunday that he doesn’t want to invite Mrs Merkel to speak at rallies during the upcoming Bavarian election campaign, a first in the nearly 70 year history of the parties.
Profile | Angela Merkel
Instead, the new right-wing Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who is an opponent of Mrs Merkel's refugee policy, has agreed to speak.
Mr Kurz, who attended the summit, warned on Saturday that if Germany turned back migrants, Vienna would reinstate border controls, despite its membership of the Schengen zone.
“The situation is risky,” one EU diplomat said.
The fresh faces of German politics who could replace Angela Merkel
Meanwhile, Mr Macron’s popularity in France hit a new low of 40 per cent because of controversies over spending at his residences, perceived elitism and cutting remarks on welfare benefits.
The poll showed the decline in popularity was particularly acute among France's over-65s - the age group where Mr Macron found the strongest support in the presidential election last year.
In that category alone, Mr Macron suffered an 8-point fall in one month to 38 per cent, highlighting pensioners' frustration over the higher tax bills they have been paying since the start of the year.
