European council president says stakes are high and time is short before summit on issue

The EU must tackle the migration crisis or risk losing ground to authoritarian leaders, the head of the European council, Donald Tusk, has said before the start of a summit that will be dominated by Europe’s response to people fleeing war, poverty or seeking a better life.



The leaders of 28 EU countries, including Theresa May, will gather in Brussels on Thursday to discuss migration and EU-US relations.

Migration has shot to the top of the political agenda in several EU nations, including Germany, where doubts surround the political future of Angela Merkel after she opened the borders to 1 million refugees.

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On the eve of the summit, Tusk said the issue was providing ammunition to opponents of liberal democracy around the world.



“There are voices in Europe and around the world claiming that our inefficiency in maintaining the external border is an inherent feature of the European Union, or – more broadly – of liberal democracy,” he said.

Decrying new political movements that offered “simple answers to the most complicated questions”, he said: “More and more people are starting to believe that only strong-handed authority, anti-European and anti-liberal in spirit, with a tendency towards overt authoritarianism, is capable of stopping the wave of illegal migration.



“If people believe them, that only they can offer an effective solution to the migration crisis, they will also believe anything else they say. The stakes are very high. And time is short.”

In the last year, far-right parties have come to power in coalition governments in Italy and Austria, and an anti-immigration nationalist party has entered the German parliament for the first time in 60 years. Populist governments in Hungary and Poland have been making political capital with anti-immigration campaigns.

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In an interview with the Guardian, Spain’s new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said “inflammatory rhetoric” was no way to solve the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean.

He did not mention Italy’s hardline interior minister, Matteo Salvini, by name, but said: “As effective as the inflammatory rhetoric from some Italian leaders may be in electoral terms, from the point of view of responding effectively to a humanitarian crisis like the one we’re seeing in the Mediterranean and on the Italian coast it’s not the answer.”

The EU is sharply divided over how to manage refugees inside the bloc, but it has proved far easier to agree on more action aimed at would-be arrivals from Africa and the Middle East.



EU leaders are expected to call for the development of migrant screening centres in north Africa, in an attempt to deter people from making life-threatening sea crossings of the Mediterranean. A senior EU official insisted the centres, known as “regional disembarkation platforms”, would not be migrant camps, while conceding it was not clear exactly how they would work.

The official said details needed to be worked out with UN agencies and north African countries. “We know what our objectives are, we know with whom we want to work on it and we know we need to respect international law. But the key priority from our perspective is to break the business model of smugglers and prevent the tragic loss of life.”



It remains unclear whether European countries are ready to pay €3bn (£2.6bn) to fund refugee aid in Turkey, the second tranche of money promised in 2016. The pledge was part of an EU-Turkey deal that has drastically cut migration across the eastern Mediterranean to Greece.