As reported by Reuters, Italy’s prime minister refused to approve an EU summit agreement on Thursday, insisting that fellow EU leadership must meet the Italian pm’s demands on migration first.
Key quotes
“The move by Giuseppe Conte, who is attending his first European Union summit, surprised other leaders and forced summit chairman Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to cancel a news conference planned for Thursday evening.
Conte, the head of a new euroskeptic government that includes the anti-establishment 5-Star movement and the far-right League, is demanding that other EU states share the costs and burden of handling migrants that are rescued in the Mediterranean.
His move came after leaders held talks on a range of issues from security and defense, to jobs, growth and competitiveness. Normally, they would issue pre-prepared conclusions once that discussion was over.
But Conte’s intervention, ahead of a dinner where the controversial migration issue is due to be discussed, prevented that. If unresolved, the row would send a horrible signal about the EU’s unity at a time when the bloc is being assailed by U.S. President Donald Trump on trade and struggling to deal with the legacy of its 2015 crisis, which saw more than a million refugees and migrants enter Europe.
It is especially dangerous for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU’s longest serving leader, who is under intense pressure from her conservative allies in Bavaria to deliver a deal on migration in Brussels. If she fails, the Christian Social Union (CSU) has threatened to unilaterally close their border to migrants.
That could trigger the collapse of Merkel’s three-month-old government and cause the EU’s Schengen free travel zone to unravel, putting cross-border business, trade and many jobs among the EU’s 500 million citizens at risk.”
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