What the commentators said

There was a time when I dismissed the Brexiteer claim that in quitting the EU, we’d be leaving a “sinking ship”, said Niall Ferguson in The Sunday Times. No longer. It looks increasingly as though future historians will regard immigration as the “fatal solvent” that led to the bloc’s disintegration. They will argue that a massive influx of people (an estimated two million arrived in 2016 alone) derailed the dream of European integration, exposed the bloc’s weakness and drove voters back to their national governments for solutions. Brexit will be viewed as only an early symptom of the crisis, as Europeans begin to realise how hard it is to maintain both open borders and welfare states. A change in attitudes to the EU is clear in Germany. Merkel’s CDU has been allied with the Bavarian CSU since 1949, said Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. But her support for European integration has now collided with the CSU’S unilateralism. “It is the essential conflict in European politics of our time”, and an early climax looks inevitable.

Merkel still hopes to avert a domestic showdown, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. The chancellor has been convening meetings with EU leaders before next week’s summit, to pave the way for an immigration deal that is acceptable to her CSU allies. But she’s unlikely to succeed because, on this issue, “Europe is stuck”. Its pro-brussels politicians support the idea of migrants being shared more evenly between member states, to relieve the pressure on countries like Italy – but face bitter opposition to that idea at home. Anti-eu politicians, meanwhile, are furious either that the EU isn’t doing more to help them deal with migrants (e.g. Italy) or that it’s trying to force them to take migrants (e.g. Hungary). Still, it’s too early to write off Merkel, said The Economist. She’s still the most popular politician in Germany, and polls indicate that voters are tiring of Seehofer’s “theatrics”. What Germans prize above all is stability; as long as Merkel looks like stability’s best “guarantor” she will remain “a force to be reckoned with”.