Germany’s Merkel blasts EU’s Tusk over migration policy: reports
PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki
15.12.2017 12:30
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has hit out at top European Union official Donald Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, over his critical comments about the bloc’s migration policy, according to media reports.
European Council President Donald Tusk (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) during a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on Thursday. Photo: EPA/OLIVIER HOSLET
On the first day of an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, Merkel said that the bloc needed solidarity on migration policy and that member countries could not show only "selective solidarity" in dealing with the migration crisis, various media reported.
Her remarks followed a statement by Tusk, the president of the European Council, who has branded EU mandatory migrant quotas as “ineffective” and “highly divisive.”
The Reuters news agency has cited unnamed German officials as saying that Merkel has been critical of Tusk, who, in an letter to EU leaders ahead of the Brussels summit, said that a plan by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, forcing member states to accept migrants on the basis of mandatory quotas had failed.
German FM says Poles distrustful of migrants for historical reasons: report
Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has appealed for understanding of why people in Poland are against taking in migrants, which he said results from Poland’s historical experience, according to a report by wiadomosci.onet.pl, a Polish news website.
Gabriel said during a discussion on German public television ZDF that he did not approve of an approach based on refusing to accept refugees, but considered it "completely normal" that Poland had "a different approach to certain forms of liberalism," according to wiadomosci.onet.pl.
“You do not have to agree with others, but you have to understand why they act in a specific way," said Gabriel, a German Social Democrat, as quoted by wiadomosci.onet.pl.
He mentioned Poland’s more than a century of foreign rule until 1918, its bitter experience of the Russian and German invasions of 1939 and its decades of communism after World War II when the country was under Soviet control.
“A free Poland has actually only existed for just over 25 years," wiadomosci.onet.pl quoted Gabriel as saying.
(gs/pk)
Source: wiadomosci.onet.pl, Reuters