EU seeks consensus on migration

Bloomberg

European leaders gathered in Brussels on Sunday for an informal meeting aimed at paving the way to a deal on the management of migration, amid an escalating crisis that threatens to unravel the bloc’s passport-free travel area and dissolve Germany’s governing coalition.
“This is not about the survival of a chancellor,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said. “It’s about finding a solution, and I hope a common one, for a migration and asylum policy in Europe. We need that.”
Participating leaders arrived with different priorities: frontier countries including Italy seek more assistance from their peers with border protection and a more equitable allocation of refugees between the bloc’s member states. Northern countries, including Germany, want to limit “secondary movements” of protection-seekers from the south, where they initially apply for asylum, to the more affluent states of the European core.
With the bloc’s 28 nations at loggerheads over the overhaul of rules that assign responsibility for asylum-seekers to the countries of first arrival but are not in practice enforced, the prospects for an EU-wide immigration agreement are slim, officials familiar with the discussions said. Germany will instead seek a patchwork of bilateral deals with frontier states, which would limit secondary movements in return for financial support and yet unspecified other concessions.
“We know that unfortunately, we won’t get a holistic solution to the migration problem at the European summit,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. “That’s why it’s also about bi- or trilateral agreements.”
Even as the pace of arrivals has dropped sharply compared with previous years, a hardening rhetoric from Italy’s populist coalition and right-wing governments including Austria’s has soured relations among the bloc’s members. In Germany, Merkel is facing an ultimatum from her Bavarian allies to either strike a deal for limiting the influx of asylum-seekers by the end of this month or face a mutiny that could trigger snap elections.
EU government officials in Brussels said that if Merkel gives in to the demands of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) party to turn away refugees already registered in other EU countries at the border, then the entire Schengen Area of paperwork-free travel would be at risk of collapse.