‘Europe is a Plane Without a Pilot’: E Europeans Threaten to Veto Brexit

During the first post-Brexit EU summit in Bratislava on Friday a group of Central European countries, known as the Visegrad Four, threatened to vote down any Brexit agreement that would infringe on people’s right to work in the United Kingdom.

The summit’s Slovakian host, Prime Minister Robert Fico, warned that Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia would dig their heels in on this issue and that no compromise was possible in negotiations.

In an interview with Radio Sputnik Constance Le Grip, a French member of the European Parliament from The Republicans Party and deputy head of the French delegation to the European People’s Party, said that in Bratislava the attending heads iof state and government were “walking in circles approving a declaration which is just a repetition of what they had previously said and written many times over.

“There is no idea in it, no real reset. It is completely devoid of creativity and a desire to make things right. A useless summit,”  she said.

When asked what she thought about the promise by the Visegrad Four to veto the agreement on Britain’s exit from the European Union if it limited their citizens’ right to work in the UK, Constance Le Grip said that the statement by these four EU countries was starkly at variance with the agenda of the Bratislava summit.

“This is a graphic example of things going awry there, that they have neither a leader, not a political leadership. Europe is a plane without a pilot which is bound to crash,” she added.

Speaking in Bratislava, French President Francois Hollande warned about the dangers facing the 27-nation bloc.

“We face either break-up, weakening — or we choose the opposite, together giving Europe a purpose," he insisted.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi described the summit as ”a missed opportunity” to discuss the future of the European Union, breathe new vigor into the bloc  and “to work towards the goals outlined  by the European leaders.”