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EU leaders see 'road map' rebuilding trust after Brexit

16 September 2016 22:33 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. EU leaders, meeting without their British counterpart on Friday, said they had come up with a "road map" of strategies for rebuilding public trust in the European Union after the shock of Britain's vote to leave, APA reports quoting Reuters.

However, among pledges of cooperation to come up with a plan by the 60th anniversary of the Union's founding treaty in March, arguments over how to handle an influx of refugees rumbled on.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying the British vote had plunged the rest of the bloc into a "critical" situation, said the 27 had agreed at a day-long summit Bratislava to use the next six months to develop a plan to reinvigorate the Union.

"We have agreed that Europe, in the critical situation it's in after the referendum in Britain but also due to other problems we have, that we must jointly agree on an agenda, that we must have a working plan," she said, referring to a summit in the Italian capital to mark 60 years of the Treaty of Rome.

Merkel said the EU needed more solidarity and cooperation, the values it was founded on by six countries in 1957.

That sounded like a barbed reference to continued frustration with especially ex-communist eastern states which have refused to take in asylum-seekers, many of the Muslims, even as Merkel let in a million people last year.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, her bete noir on the issue, said the summit had failed to change EU immigration policies that he called "self-destructive and naive". He planned a new push for change at meeting of Balkan states on Sept. 24.

Others were keener to highlight positives from the meeting.

French President Francois Hollande, sitting alongside her in a demonstration of how Britain's departure has thrown the focus back on to the two old enemies who drove the bloc's foundation after World War Two, said the summit had shown that the Union could move on after the British referendum result.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said on Twitter: "We have a proposal of a road map for concrete steps for strengthening citizens confidence in the functioning of the EU."