BRUSSELS — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany met here Sunday with leaders of East European countries along the main migrant trail to affluent parts of Europe in a new push to bring some order to a chaotic flow of tens of thousands of people seeking shelter from war or simply a better life.
The gathering, called at Merkel’s behest by the European Union’s top executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, was the fifth consecutive meeting of leaders focused on so far fruitless efforts to deal with Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II.
Voicing despair at Europe’s failure to forge a common policy, Miro Cerar, the prime minister of Slovenia, which has been swamped by 60,000 people from Syria and elsewhere over the past 10 days, said continued failure to act in concert would signal “the beginning of the end of the European Union and Europe as such.” Europe, he said, “will begin falling apart.”
The European Commission, the union’s executive arm, has proposed a raft of plans and programs since the early summer to deal with the migrant crisis but a wide chasm has opened up between talk in Brussels and real action on the ground.
In the five months since the Commission first announced a plan to relocate 40,000 refugees from Greece and Italy to other European countries, for example, only 87 people have been moved. At the current pace, it would take more than 750 years to relocate the 160,000 asylum-seekers covered by a now expanded resettlement plan.
Arriving in Brussels on Sunday, Merkel added her own powerful voice to calls for solid action instead of statements. But while insisting the emergency meeting should focus on “practical questions,” she cautioned that it would not be possible to resolve the “whole question of refugees,” because that would require talks with Turkey, which was not represented at the Brussels meeting.
Even so, she said leaders needed to find a way to help people who were “erratically wandering around, often under excruciating circumstances” and better share the burden of providing for them among the various nations involved along what has become known as the “Balkan Route.”
At home, Merkel faces growing pressure from within her conservative bloc, which has suffered in opinion polls because of the crisis. Support for the chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union has dropped to its lowest point in three years, according to one prominent German polling firm.
Recent weeks have seen a rise in the number of far-right attacks in Germany and the tone of the political discourse has become increasingly raw, worrying security officials and raising questions over the chancellor’s insistence that the country can handle the influx of asylum seekers, expected to reach at least 800,000 this year.
Unlike previous meetings devoted to the migration issue, Sunday’s gathering of 11 leaders included not only countries that belong to the 28-nation European Union but others outside the bloc, Albania, Macedonia and Serbia. “Exceptional times demand exceptional measures,” Merkel said.
Gjorge Ivanov, the leader of Macedonia, through which most asylum seekers pass on their way from Greece to northern Europe, said 10,000 people are entering his country each day. “If we don’t stick together we will all hang separately,” he said, citing Benjamin Franklin.
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s pugnacious prime minister, sounded a characteristically defiant tone upon his arrival Sunday in Brussels, saying that he was attending as only an “observer” as Hungary is no longer part of the migrant trail. Orban repeated his longstanding position that the only realistic way to solve the crisis is for the European Union to take over control of Greece’s eastern border with Turkey, the main corridor for migrants and refugees seeking entry to Europe.
