Angela Merkel urges EU consensus on migrants

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Wednesday urged an EU “common stance” on the migrant crisis and on protecting the bloc’s frontiers, as eastern members move to shut internal borders.

On the eve of an EU summit, Ms Merkel said “the main thing now is to have a common stance on how to secure the external borders, and here the EU-Turkey plan offers a good solution”.

Ms Merkel, under heavy pressure at home to reduce arrivals, supports a plan under which transit country Turkey would seal its borders and then fly refugees to Europe where they would be settled under an EU quota system.

However, most EU countries have shown little enthusiasm for the idea, and the so-called Visegrad Four — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary — have openly defied Ms Merkel.

They have pledged to help Macedonia and Bulgaria close their borders with Greece, which would leave Athens with rapidly rising numbers of refugees while effectively excluding it from Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone.

Ms Merkel said that “we will speak at the upcoming EU Council about how we can work together to protect our external border, and I want us to work together on the EU-Turkish agenda that 28 members have decided”.

She was speaking at a Berlin joint press conference with Sri Lanka’s visiting President Maithripala Sirisena before she was set to address the German parliament on the EU summit’s topics.

Ms Merkel, a decade in power, has seen her long-stellar domestic support drop over her liberal migration policy since more than 1.1 million asylum seekers came to Germany last year.

Elsewhere in Austria, the interior minister said Wednesday the country would cap the daily number of asylum claims at 80 to slow down the migrant flow at its southern borders.

In addition, the government will grant entry to a total of 3,200 migrants per day “who want to seek asylum in a neighbouring state”, Johanna Mikl-Leitner told the APA news agency.

“Austria is among the EU countries most under strain and is reaching breaking point. It stands to reason to want to secure your own borders when there is no European solution,” she said. The measure will come into effect on Friday, the minister added.

The move comes a day after Vienna said it would step up controls at existing checkpoints along its southern borders with Italy, Slovenia and Hungary to slow down the influx of migrants and refugees trekking up along the Balkans.

The daily limit on asylum claims is in line with Austria’s announcement last month.