Mr Hollande said the EU’s internal borders “must be strengthened” and said the bloc must “fully play its role” in conflicts in the Middle East.
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The 27 leaders say they want to show they can respond to the challenges of mass migration, security, globalisation and a stuttering economy.
“We have agreed that Europe, in the critical situation it’s in after the referendum in Britain but also due to other problems we have, that we must jointly agree on an agenda, that we must have a working plan”, she said, referring to a summit in the Italian capital to mark 60 years of the Treaty of Rome.
“We need solutions for Europe and we are in a critical situation”, Merkel said as she arrived at the gathering.
Hollande is trailing in the polls ahead of next May’s French presidential elections.
“We face either break-up, weakening – or we choose the opposite, together giving Europe a goal”, said Hollande, who has made common cause with Berlin on boosting European Union defence cooperation.
The final statement from the summit, the Bratislava Statement, said that “although one country has chose to leave it, the European Union remains indispensable”.
Tusk argued that a new roadmap drafted by his office and backed by European Union leaders Friday would guide discussions over the next six months.
“The political agenda of the day for the upcoming months may be defined at the Bratislava summit”, said a source close to the European Union leadership.
Greeted by soldiers in bright blue uniforms and ceremonial plumes, the leaders held a first round of talks in towering Bratislava castle and then lunched on a river cruise aboard a German-flagged boat down the Danube to informally discuss Brexit.
“During my visit to London and talks with Theresa May it was for both of us absolutely clear that we have to wait for this formal triggering of article 50 and Theresa May was vey open and honest with me and declared it is nearly impossible to trigger article 50 this year but it’s quite likely they will be ready maybe in January, maybe in February next year”. An EU summit, without the participation of the United Kingdom, will kick on Friday discussion on the future of the EU followin.
Leaders of 27 EU member states have convened in Bratislava to have what European Council president Donald Tusk has called a “brutally honest” conversation about the EU’s future.
But cracks in the European Union are evident.
Yet Fico himself has been a divisive figure on the migrant issue, refusing to allow in a “single Muslim” and taking the EU’s refugee sharing policy to court.
Through the forum of the Visegrad group – an informal alliance of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia which meets regularly before summits – these countries are becoming an increasingly powerful voice.
“It is of great importance that we are leaving today with a new political agenda that will open the process of European Union reforms”, Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said.
Pressure is mounting among several prominent member states, after Luxembourg’s foreign minister attacked Hungary, saying they should be thrown out for their treatment of asylum seekers.
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The Eastern Europeans also oppose compulsory relocation of migrants around the bloc to ease the burden on Greece and Italy, part of more fundamental opposition to power being centralised in Brussels. The U.K.’s vote to quit the club it joined in 1973, terrorist attacks in the EU’s major cities, a wave of migration from outside its borders that’s frayed the fabric of social cohesion and a jobless rate twice that of the US have combined to strangle Europe’s confidence and raise question about the bloc’s force for good.
