Eastern EU urges more democracy post-Brexit

WARSAW, July 21: (AFP) – Central European leaders on Thursday urged reforms to give national parliaments a bigger say in the EU, in a bid to stem the frustration that fuelled Britain’s vote to leave.

“The European Commission hasn’t fully understood what happened in the British referendum,” Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo told a press conference in Warsaw with her Czech, Hungarian and Slovak counterparts.

“We believe it’s up to national parliaments to have the final word on the decisions of the European Commission,” the right-winger added.

The Visegrad Four leaders pledged unity ahead of an informal September 16 EU summit in Bratislava to be held without Britain which is intended to map out a course for the bloc after Brexit.

A joint statement said they want a future based on the “EU’s four basic freedoms”, including unfettered movement of goods, services, capital and people.

“We have the opportunity to forge a stronger EU, one more focused on European citizens than European institutions,” Szydlo said, vowing that security would be a top priority.

Outspoken right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that without Britain, the EU “stopped being a global player.”

“We arrived at the dramatic point of losing Britain because the European Commission… took the worst possible decisions on migration policy,” said Orban, long a fierce Brussels critic.”With crisis still raging in the Middle East and Africa, we should expect a massive influx of people.

“It is therefore crucial for the EU to finally clarify its migration policy,” Orban said, insisting that “anyone who wants to enter the EU should be able to apply outside its borders”.Budapest plans an October 2 referendum on taking in migrants under a troubled EU mandatory quota plan, a scheme approved by a majority of EU member states.

Hungary joined Slovakia in filing a legal challenge against it.Britons voted last month to leave the EU in a seismic referendum, following a campaign in which “Leave” advocates focused heavily on migration.

They accused hundreds of thousands of EU and other immigrants of pushing down wages for low-paid Britons and overburdening public services.

Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros on Thursday warned the EU could “fall apart more quickly than expected”.

Echoing Visegrad leaders in an op-ed published by Poland’s popular Wirtualna Polska news website, Soros urged “European leaders to recognise their mistakes and the democracy deficit inherent to the current institutional order.RSS