German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron jointly stressed yesterday on the need for an EU-wide solution to the migration crisis that is currently casting a shadow over co-operation between European neighbours.
“Our aim remains a European answer to this challenge,” Merkel said, following a day-long meeting in Meseberg near Berlin.
She noted that formulating a joint EU asylum policy is difficult.
Macron echoed her words.
“We believe in a European answer to the challenges that migration poses for us,” he said, adding that for him all 28 member states had to be involved.
Referring to her talks on Monday with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Merkel stressed the need for the EU external borders to be strengthened by boosting the Frontex border and coastguard agency.
Macron called for an “efficient system of solidarity and responsibility” with refugees registered on arrival on EU soil.
The French president urged closer co-operation with countries of origin and transit, Libya in particular, in order to combat human trafficking.
“The humanitarian crises starts where one leaves the Libyan coast,” he said.
He backed a European Commission proposal to expand Frontex to a staff of 10,000.
Germany and France had assured each other that refugees registered in the EU would be sent back as soon as possible to the country of initial registration, Macron said.
A joint statement released after their meeting near Berlin pledged to “jointly and resolutely tackle secondary movements inside the EU” and to ensure swift transfers to the relevant member state.
Going into the talks, Merkel was under intense pressure within her coalition to find a solution to the refugee crisis by the end of the month, a deadline set by her coalition partners, the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (CSU).
The chancellor, battered by a loss of support in September elections, is locked in a dispute with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of the CSU.
Seehofer, backed by his party, has threatened to break with government policy against unilateral border controls and start turning away migrants trying to enter the country illegally, thereby undermining EU solidarity by shifting the problem to neighbouring countries.
Merkel aims to create an EU body to secure the bloc’s external borders and a quota system to redistribute refugees across the bloc.
However, there was scepticism in the CSU.
“We do not believe that European solutions can be achieved within two weeks, considering it hasn’t worked for the past three years,” Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Soeder, a close Seehofer ally, told DPA.
In Brussels, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos called on Germany to co-operate with its neighbours, after behaving in an exemplary way at the height of the migration crisis in 2015.
“I would like to call on everybody to show more trust and solidarity among member states and to work together in the European way,” he said, noting that solidarity and responsibility are “very basic principles and values of the European project”.
“We shouldn’t leave space and ground for the ones who are putting into doubt our European values,” the commissioner warned.




Related Story