Brussels, 22/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi repeated his warning on Monday 22 February about one-way solidarity within the European Union.
“If you don't show solidarity on migration, I think it is absolutely legitimate for bigger countries to not show solidarity on [EU budget] contributions”, the Italian leader is reported by the agency DPA as telling the foreign correspondents' club. He added: “You cannot imagine that Germany, Austria, Sweden, Italy take on their own all the burden of migrants and refugees and at the same time give economic aid to all the others”.
To Renzi's mind, the countries which are in the forefront of the massive influx of refugees and which are net contributors to the EU budget are fully entitled to call for solidarity from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe which are baulking at bearing some of the weight in taking in migrants but are happy to take significant funding from European structural funds.
The Italian prime minister had already said as much, at dinner during the most recent European summit which devoted a long discussion on Thursday 18 February to migration (see EUROPE 11394). Austria's recent decision to impose a ceiling on the number of refugees it is willing to take in could very well lead to a chain reaction of restrictive measures on the parts of the countries along the Balkans migration route in an effort to staunch the tide of people trying to reach the richest countries of the EU. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)