Slovakia lashes out at EU’s direction as it assumes rotating presidency

Slovakia has warned that the European Union’s future cannot be dictated by a few powerful Western members, as it assumed the union’s six-month rotating presidency.

The comments were made by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, following a meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Bratislava.

“Crucial decisions about the future of Europe cannot be defined by two, three members states, or the founding states of the EU,” he said. “The EU’s future can no longer be defined without active involvement of the states that joined after 2004.”

Germany, France and Italy held three-way talks on Monday to discuss the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. Fico has challenged the EU during the recent migrant crisis, refusing to be part of a quota plan for distributing asylum seekers across member states.

The Visegrad countries – Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – are urging more power to be returned to national countries and for the European Commission to play a reduced role.

“If our citizens understand less and less what the EU is doing, it is because there are too much institutions and too little member states,” Slovakian foreign minister Miroslav Lajcak said.

Czech foreign minister Lubomir Zaoralek wrote an article in the Financial Times that he was “truly baffled” by proposals for further EU integration put forward immediately after the Brexit vote.

Poland’s deputy prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has called for moves to reconcile two different visions of Europe’s future.

“On the one hand we have complete disintegration, and on the other hand we have extreme attempts, like building some utopia that is the United States of Europe, in which after al, no one believes.”