Allies of Angela Merkel have hailed talks in Brussels as a toughening of the EU’s stance on migration, but it remains unclear if the deal will win over the German chancellor’s staunchest opponents in Bavaria and thus save her fraying coalition government.

Emerging from the summit on Friday morning, Merkel said the joint message was a “good signal”. While a lot of work was needed to create a joint asylum system, the chancellor said, “I am optimistic after today that we can really continue to work on this”.

Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for budget and human resources, described the outcome of the summit as a “genuine breakthrough”.

“I believe there are good reasons why the CSU [Christian Social Union] will recognise this as a big step in the right direction,” Oettinger told German radio. “We in the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] will recognise it as a big step in the right direction.”

The former Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz said the agreement was a pragmatic decision that should appease the interior minister, Horst Seehofer, who has threatened to start turning away migrants already registered in other EU states from German borders if Merkel does not come up with a European solution by the start of July.

“Merkel has given Horst what he wanted,” Schulz told Die Welt, adding that the statement’s language about taking “all necessary internal legislative and administrative measures” to prevent secondary movement across the bloc’s internal borders looked tailor-made for Seehofer’s concerns.

Schulz, a former president of the European parliament, predicted that a “coalition of the willing”, consisting at least of Germany, France and Spain, would set up bigger processing centres for asylum seekers inside the EU, and called for more money from the EU budget for those who volunteered to take an active role.

The Bavarian CSU, the CDU’s sister party which had created the pressure for Merkel to emerge from the summit with a new deal on migration, had already switched to de-escalation mode before the German delegation went to Brussels.

The deal was hailed as a success by Italy’s populist prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, who said it showed his country was no longer alone in dealing with the migrant crisis.

However, back in Rome the man who has single-handedly set Italy’s agenda since the far-right/populist alliance came to power a month ago was more cautious.

The far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, said on a morning talkshow that progress had been made in principle on the issues of protecting the EU’s external border and “real investment” in Africa. His tone, however, suggested a wait-and-see approach and he reiterated that Italy’s ports would be closed to all NGOs involved in rescuing migrants from the sea: “They will only see Italy in a postcard.”

Far from endorsing any of the vague proposals that have been adopted, Salvini emphasised that Italy had an outsized role in the summit, and had succeeded in in setting the agenda, forcing EU partners to recognise his country’s issues and problems.

In Germany, Seehofer had told German TV before the summit that, while the situation was serious, the conversations that had been started were “quite sensible”. On Thursday night, the former Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber said on a talkshow: “I am confident after hearing what is coming out of Brussels. I believe that a way can still be found.”

The CSU delegate Hans Michelbach described the deal as a “positive signal” but did not rule out that his party’s interior minister could decide to take drastic actions on the German border.

“You have to recognise with pleasure that the path of a joint European asylum policy is the right path,” he told the German broadcaster ARD on Friday morning. “The question is what it means for the national border and taking in [of migrants] at the moment and in the coming months: is it necessary to take action immediately?”

Heads of the CSU and the CDU will meet separately in Munich and Berlin on Sunday afternoon to discuss the outcome of the summit.

While the EU leaders’ resolution did explicitly address the Bavarians’ bugbears about asylum practices on Germany’s borders, it represented a toughening of language on migration.

The aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières warned that the deal would lead to further deaths in the Mediterranean sea and people being stuck in internment camps in Libya.

“The EU states have to come to their senses,” MSF said. “They are withdrawing from their responsibility to save human lives.”

However, the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, described the agreement an “important step in the right direction”.



“We are happy that there is at last a focus on the external borders,” said Kurz, who is often portrayed as an ally of Seehofer and apparently threatened Germany with retaliations if it moved to unilaterally turn away asylum seekers from its borders.

“If Germany takes measures in this respect, then we will obviously also take the same measures on our borders in order to avoid damage to the Austrian republic,” Kurz said on Thursday.