by
N. Peter Kramer
Meanwhile, the EU memberstates refusing to take in migrants, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic (the ‘Visigrad Four’) let know they would not attend. French President Emmanuel Macron however wants a swift deal on migration; it would allow the European Summit to focus on his plans on reform to the Eurozone.
The idea for the meeting most probably comes from Berlin, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel is fighting for her political survival. Her conservative Bavarian allies (CSU) gave her two weeks to find a European solution, following a row over immigration that threatens to scupper the three-months old German coalition government.
So she has to convince the European Summit on 28 /29 June in Brussels.
Never before Angela Merkel position was so depended of other politicians, in the first place of her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, the number one of the CSU; and of her colleagues in the Summit who she begged to rescue her. It is clear that the CSU has escalated the struggle to such an extent that there aren’t many ways back.
President Macron accused populism in the EU as a ‘leprosy’. Italy’s anti-establishment leaders, assuming he was referring to them, hit back by calling Macron as a ‘chatterbox’ and accusing him of hypocrisy. The French President condemned the Italian government for not accepting the Aquarius migrant ship but in the meantime, he is under pressure in his own country for not doing anything himself.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said ‘ the real leprosy is the hypocrisy of someone who pushes back immigrants at his own border and then wants to preach to us’; referring to the French border police sending harshly young refugees back at the French-Italian border.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will come to Sunday’s migration mini-summit, he said, as long as there is no joint statement of the participants!
