Migration plan exposes EU rifts, tough bargaining ahead

Hours of late-night squabbling in Europe’s highest council of state left EU leaders licking political wounds on Friday and preparing for weeks of hard bargaining over a plan to cope with a flood of migrants from the south. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called finding a common EU solution to the hundreds of thousands fleeing by sea and land from Africa and the Middle East the “biggest challenge” Europe had faced in her decade in power - greater than the Greek and wider euro zone debt crises and Russian action against Ukraine. Donald Tusk, the former Polish premier who chaired the two-day European Council in Brussels, echoed that, saying he could recall few other EU summits that had been more difficult.

This will be the transformative issue for the Union for the next decade.

a senior EU diplomat said

Migration is fuelling public hostility to open borders and to the EU project as a whole, even as many recognize a need for immigration to support their aging populations. How leaders reconcile competing national interests to deal with a problem they agree needs a joint response may prove a defining moment. The summit exposed sharp differences between Mediterranean states, notably Italy, which have borne the brunt of growing numbers of refugees and economic migrants, and poorer ex-Communist countries in the east, who feared costs and disruption from EU proposals to force them to take in a share of those in transit.