Years of economic crisis have pushed up unemployment in many member states, while a spate of attacks by Islamist militants and a record influx of migrants have unsettled voters, who are turning increasingly to populist, anti-EU parties.
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Mujtaba Rahman of political risk consultancy Eurasia said the summit may only end up advertising “the scarcity of common ground” among the EU-27 and the weakness of its most important leaders Merkel, Hollande and Italy’s Matteo Renzi.
“I don’t think there has been a fundamental chilling effect”, Alex Wilmot-Sitwell, president for Europe at Bank of America Merrill Lynch told the European Union affairs financial sub-committee.
“Perhaps there was a time when this could not have got nasty”, said one source close to Mr Verhofstadt, “but when the Brexit minister calls the chief negotiator “Satan”, what is the response, really, that Britain expects?”
With May keeping other European Union leaders waiting before setting out Britain’s demands and starting negotiations, there will be little talk of Brexit at a summit prompted by the British vote.
He says European leaders warned former prime minister David Cameron that the vote was a mistake and says European leaders view the Brexit decision as “political amputation of the first degree”.
Mr Tusk will chair the meeting, in which European Union sources said the migration crisis, risks of terrorism and people feeling alienated by globalisation would be the three main topics on the agenda.
“We need a strong, stable and united Europe”.
Poland’s government, a fierce critic of EU federalism, has been trying to rally other eastern European countries behind an agenda in favour of national sovereignty. The government accuses Tusk of failing to defend Poland’s interests in the EU.
The British exit has given rise to much soul-searching among the remaining 27 nations and their leaders will meet in Bratislava on Friday to plot the way ahead.
The EU, a bloc of 500 million people, has been under siege since the 2008 global financial crash threw millions out of work and austerity policies undercut its claim that it alone guaranteed a better economic future.
Jean Claude Juncker said it is no surprise that the country voted to leave the European Union earlier this year because the public have been told that the EU is “stupid” for decades. The EU Commission risks “repeating, in an even more toxic dimension, all the mistakes that we saw a year ago”, Polish EU Affairs Minister Konrad Szymanski told reporters in Brussels Monday.
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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) – In a centuries-old castle in the middle of their fractious continent, European Union leaders on Friday anxiously sought to forge a sense of common objective in the face of the planned departure of Britain and fundamental disagreements over everything from uncontrolled migration to the economy.
