EU leaders gather for summit to jumpstart stalling bloc

Rick Owen
00:29, Sep 18, 2016
Copyright 2015 All rights reserved. This material can't be published, transferred, copied or redistributed.

Even though Britain's referendum result is not on the agenda, and the British Prime Minister Theresa May is not attending the summit, there is little doubt that Brexit will overshadow the meeting. Other EU nations committed extra equipment and personnel. Merkel, who hasn't said whether she'll seek another term in Germany's 2017 election, is standing her ground amid electoral gains by an anti-immigration party and a split in her coalition over her refusal to cap immigration.

With Britain's withdrawal clouded in confusion and no clear signal on whether the country intends to stay in the single market or not, Europe's 27 other leaders gathered on Friday for an informal summit in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava, without the PM.

The refugee emergency has been particularly divisive and Orban has been one of the most abrasive voices as he makes common cause with other countries to the East - Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland - to oppose solutions coming out of European Union headquarters in Brussels.

European Union leaders were set Friday to craft a new vision for the future of their bloc, with a top official calling for "brutally honest" talks after Britain's shock decision to withdraw.

"We must rectify a number of things in order to preserve what is best", Tusk wrote.

As they gather in Bratislava for a meeting without the United Kingdom, they will discuss ways to regain trust in the EU. Countries in the east - Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and others - have openly opposed proposed solutions coming out of European Union headquarters Brussels and even defied the wishes of their neighbors.

But new perceived threats, both elemental and existential, have emerged since the treaty became law.

US rig count down 2 this week to 506
The tally of gas rigs fell by three to 89, and miscellaneous rigs fell by one, taking the total count down two to 506. The total count is lower by 336 from a year earlier, while the oil-only is down by 225.

The Hungarian leader said that while the EU leaders had voted for voluntary refugee resettlement quotas, the EU parliament and the EU Commission transformed them into mandatory quotas.

In a sign of the tensions over migration, Luxembourg's foreign minister this week called for Hungary to be suspended from the bloc for treating refugees like "animals".

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose country has been at the center of the region's debt crisis and seen the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly from Turkey, over the past year said things can not continue as they are. How to deal with the euro's problems remains divisive - on one-side pro-austerity countries led by Germany, on the other more social-minded governments.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose country was one of the EU's founders, insisted internal quarrels were not new.

In a statement on the eve of the summit, Mr Tusk said it was true that European had been shaken "by all kinds of crises" recently, and could not act as if nothing was wrong.

"People in Europe want to know if the political elites are capable of restoring control over events and processes which overwhelm, disorientate, and sometimes terrify them", Tusk wrote to the leaders. The FT quotes an unnamed senior government figure as saying: "It is in the EU's interest, as well as our own, that the position we set out at the start of the negotiation is grounded in reality".

Copyright 2015 All rights reserved. This material can't be published, transferred, copied or redistributed.


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