The European Council has ended without adopting conclusions on the issue of migration, suggesting that an agreement among the 27 member States was not possible at the summit due to opposition by Poland and Hungary.
There will be a statement by European Council President Charles Michel on the issue.
Warsaw and Budapest are opposed to making solidarity in the management of migrants and refugees obligatory, something which Italy and Greece have demanded, given the high number of migrants coming to their shores via sea. Under an agreement thrashed out by interior ministers earlier this month, each country would be responsible for a share of migrants and refugees arriving in the EU and those unwilling to receive them would have to pay around 20,000 euros for each person they chose not to accept.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni had a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and her Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban on the sidelines of the European Council summit on Friday, but the talks apparently failed to break the deadlock caused by the objections the two leaders raised on Thursday.
The European Union gives more support to countries outside the bloc like Turkey to help them deal with migration than it gives to its own members, the Polish president said on Friday.
“I don’t understand why the European Commission and European institutions spent billions of euros to help Turkey when it took in a million Syrian migrants, but they were not willing to help Poland, which took in millions of refugees from Ukraine,” Andrzej Duda told private broadcaster Radio Zet.
Hungary and Poland blocked any agreement on migration during the EU summit.
The entire summit stalled as the leaders of France and Germany, plus European Council President Charles Michel, negotiated with Hungary and Poland. Eventually, everyone just gave up. Shortly after 1 a.m., EU leaders called off the summit and went home, vowing to try again Friday morning.
It was exactly what everyone had been hoping to avoid: Yet another migration mutiny.
The talks had been “difficult” and “complicated,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo conceded on his way out. “We hope the night brings some advice.”
In many ways, the failure to produce a final statement is merely cosmetic. The underlying reason behind Hungary and Poland’s 11th-hour intervention was a protest over a migration deal EU countries pushed through this month to relocate migrants across the Continent.
Statement or not, that deal will remain in place. Yet Hungary and Poland wanted to use the summit to express their discontent — and that, they certainly did.
The late-night obstruction, is just the latest indication that migration is becoming an increasingly unavoidable subject at every EU summit. And with migrants continuing to arrive via dangerous Mediterranean routes and horrific tragedies like the recent migrant boat sinking off the Greek coast, the issue is not going away.
Migration has long been one of the thorniest issues for the EU. Since the 2015 migration crisis, the bloc has tried and failed to overhaul the bloc’s process for welcoming and relocating asylum seekers.
Until last month that is. In May, EU countries finally — after months of tense negotiations — reached an agreement that did both.
The deal, in a nutshell, would install a stricter asylum procedure at the border for migrants deemed unlikely to be accepted. It would also create a system that gives EU countries the choice of either accepting a certain number of migrants each year or paying into a joint EU fund.
Hungary and Poland detest the mandatory relocations and have vowed not to cooperate.
And at Thursday’s gathering, they also expressed anger that the deal was pushed through via majority support — not unanimity. They pushed to adopt a joint statement committing to making EU migration decisions only by consensus (even though the EU doesn’t require that).
The text of one potential compromise version of the statement, seen by POLITICO, calls for the EU to “find consensus on an effective asylum and migration policy.”
Despite Hungarian and Polish protestations, the deal is not going away.
Summit organizers had been hoping to avoid such a prolonged conversation on migration, worried that it might turn heated.
They took several steps in the run-up to try and ensure the joint statement’s language placated everyone. To start, the drafts circulating ahead of time only indirectly referenced the migration agreement.
The drafts also tried to skirt another point of contention: a push from several hawkish countries to include a reference to finding “innovative solutions” on migration.
Though no one wanted to say it publicly, three officials familiar with the talks said the vague term included the prospect of sending asylum seekers to non-EU countries — a model akin to a controversial U.K. plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda. By coincidence, the U.K. proposal was dramatically struck down by the U.K. Court of Appeal Thursday just as EU leaders were arriving in Brussels.
Instead of mentioning the controversial phrase, drafters instead slipped in a reference to a letter EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s top executive, circulated to EU leaders this week, pledging that her European Commission was “ready to continue developing new ways of advancing on … objectives including through out-of-the-box thinking.”
The term “out-of-the-box thinking” — essentially a euphemism that keeps the door open for a range of migration options — got positive mentions from several leaders during Thursday’s meeting, according to the official familiar with the discussions.
One country that appeared satisfied all day: Italy.
Giorgia Meloni has successfully pulled much of the EU in her direction on migration and was the clear victor of the recent migration deal.
“It was a unique approach that fixed everyone’s problems,” she said as she arrived at the summit.
Read more via POLITICO
