The 27 European Union leaders – the entire bloc, except Britain – will gather September 16 to discuss the fallout from the British vote in June to quit the EU.
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With Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in attendance, the gathering comes less than two weeks after rescuers saved a one-day record of 6,500 migrants making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. “The way to have a bigger say is to seek a common approach and common positions”, Tsipras said.
“There are problems, a negotiation is under way. we hope for the best”, he said.
The so-called Visegrad group – made up of Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland – has demanded a tougher European Union stance on migration.
German EU lawmaker Markus Ferber, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives’ Bavarian sister party, told newspaper Die Welt he was concerned the southern countries could form a “coalition of redistributors” that would threaten Europe’s financial stability.
Austrian Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling told reporters ahead of the meeting he was “not feeling very good about Greece”.
A showdown is expected in Bratislava, with the Visegrad four already holding their own meeting in June to present a united front. “It is related to supporting business groups with additional money”, the secretariat of the Communist Initiative, a “pole” of communist parties allied to the Communist Party of Greece, announced.
Manfred Weber, head of the European People’s Party, the largest in the European Parliament, was even more scathing. Tsipras said on Friday that the so-called Euro-Mediterranean summit would next convene again in Portugal.
A day earlier, Tsipras had also hit out at Germany’s perceived domination of the EU.
Now, however, both Germany and the European Union executive are pressing for the rule to be restored, with European Union officials saying that Greece must meet the Dublin standards by the end of this year.
He also said he felt there was a strong political commitment from the EU’s remaining 27 members to move forward together.
With the EU economy struggling with anemic levels of growth, the European Central Bank has urged governments across the eurozone to do more to improve economic fundamentals.
More than 850,000 people – a lot of them fleeing conflict in war-ravaged Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – arrived on the Greek islands past year alone after risking their lives on unseaworthy boats and dinghies.
Brad Blitz, migration expert and professor of global politics at Middlesex University in Britain, said sending large numbers of asylum-seekers back to Greece would apply an ever greater strain on the country’s asylum system and reception capacity.
More than a million refugees and migrants traveled across Greece since the start of a year ago and authorities are struggling to cope with 60,000 people stranded here by European border closures.
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According to German newspaper Die Welt, this is the meeting, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel “should be afraid of” as it will challenge the controversial austerity policy imposed by Germany and other creditors in order to “help” the southern European Union members, and in particular Greece, out of the financial crisis.
