This week’s EU summit will be dominated by a deepening political crisis in the bloc over how to handle irregular immigration. Here is a look at the main issues, which countries want what, why all this matters and how it might develop.

Why is this happening now?

It is the delayed political reaction to Europe’s 2015 migration crisis. Since arrivals via the Mediterranean peaked that year at more than 1 million, migrant numbers have plummeted to 41,000 this year, according to the UN. But polls show migration has become voters’ number one concern across the bloc and the issue has swayed elections including in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary.

The immediate cause is twofold. First, the far-right League, which campaigned on a pledge to halt illegal immigration, is in government in Italy. The country has taken in 650,000 migrants since 2014 and is the point where most migrants who are still making it across – mainly via Libya – now land. The country’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader, wants to ensure other EU members share Italy’s burden. He sparked the current crisis by closing the country’s ports to foreign-flagged migrant rescue ships.

Second, Angela Merkel’s conservative sister party in Bavaria, the CSU, risks losing seats to the anti-immigration AfD in regional elections this autumn. A leading CSU member, the German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, wants the right to unilaterally turn away at the border those registered for asylum elsewhere in the EU unless the bloc agrees to spread them round more evenly. The chancellor, whose open-borders policy resulted in more than 1 million migrants arriving in Germany, opposes this because it would undermine Europe’s core Schengen passport-free zone. Merkel wants an EU-wide solution – which Seehofer has demanded she bring back from the summit.

Who wants what?

Of the key players, Germany is seeking accords, particularly with Italy, allowing it to send migrants back, in line with the EU’s Dublin principle that asylum-seekers should stay in the first state they landed in. Italy, however, is unlikely to play ball: the last thing Salvini wants is to take migrants back who have already left. Rome’s objective is to sever the link between the concept of a “first country of arrival” and a responsibility to process asylum claims. It has also said all EU countries should accept a share of refugees and economic migrants or see their EU funding cut.



That idea is anathema to the Visegrád Four – Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia – which have refused to take in asylum seekers under any EU plan and want no more discussion of such schemes. Austria, which will soon hold the EU’s rotating presidency and also has a far-right party in government, wants a “coalition of the willing” to step up. It has drafted radical plans to force most refugees to file asylum applications outside the EU.

France, which has been vocal in its criticism of the Italian approach, and Spain broadly back Merkel’s quest for an EU-wide – or at least a multilateral and European – approach based on “solidarity and responsibility”, favouring holding centres if necessary inside the EU (though preferably not on their soil) and sanctions against member states that fail to pull their weight.

What will come of it?

Broadly, pretty much everyone is agreed on measures to tighten Europe’s external borders by boosting the EU’s frontier and coastguard. They also back giving more money to third countries, mainly in Africa, to dissuade migrants from trying to reach Europe, and setting up controversial “disembarkation” centres outside the EU, probably in north African coastal states, to process migrants rescued at sea and sift asylum seekers from economic migrants. However, that plan is fraught with huge practical and legal challenges.

Where they will struggle to agree, even bilaterally, is on how to distribute irregular migrants and refugees who are already here, and those who continue to arrive in the future. Some bilateral or trilateral progress may be made but whether it will satisfy the likes of Salvini or Seehofer is unclear.