Allies of Angela Merkel have called for the German leader to be given more time to set up new bilateral migration deals with other European countries, as she returned empty-handed from an emergency mini-summit in Brussels. Sunday’s gathering of 16 European leaders had been hastily assembled to offer a lifeline to the German chancellor, as her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, is threatening to unilaterally turn away migrants already registered in another EU country at German borders unless the chancellor can come up with a European solution to the problem by 1 July.

But with the unorthodox meeting failing to reach concrete conclusions, senior members of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union have rallied around their party leader and called on its sister party, the Bavarian CSU, to adjust their expectations. “I believe there will be progress by the time of the EU summit on Thursday and Friday,” said Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for budget and human resources. “But there won’t be an agreement of the dimension that some in the CSU are expecting.”(theguardian)…[+]