Months of European efforts to come up with common policies on mass immigration unravelled on Sunday when Germany
led a “coalition of the willing” of nine EU countries taking in most
refugees from the Middle East, splitting the union formally on the
issues of mandatory refugee-sharing and funding.
An unprecedented full EU summit with Turkey agreed a fragile pact aimed at stemming the flow of migrants to Europe via Turkey.
But the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, frustrated by the
resistance in Europe to her policies, also convened a separate
mini-summit with seven other leaders to push a fast-track deal with the
Turks and to press ahead with a new policy of taking in and sharing
hundreds of thousands of refugees a year directly from Turkey.
The surprise mini-summit suggested that Merkel has given up on trying
to persuade her opponents, mostly in eastern Europe, to join a
mandatory refugee-sharing scheme across the EU, although she is also
expected to use the pro-quotas coalition to pressure the naysayers into
joining later.
Merkel’s ally on the new policy, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European commission,
said of the mini-summit: “This is a meeting of those states which are
prepared to take in large numbers of refugees from Turkey legally.”
But he added later that any such agreement would be voluntary and not
binding, while the Dutch rejected German-led calls to resettle large
numbers directly from Turkey.
The frictions triggered by the split were instantly apparent. Donald
Tusk, the president of the European council who chaired the full summit
with Turkey, contradicted the mainly west European emphasis on seeing
Ankara as the best hope of slowing the mass migration to Europe.
Read more about the meeting HERE
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