EU chief says start of Brexit talks “likely” early next year

Donald Tusk made the announcement in Bratislava, Slovakia where EU leaders discussed the future of their fractious Union, saying he had been speaking separately with the British prime minister.

The one-day Bratislava meeting should develop a roadmap to culminate in a summit in March in Rome when the 60th anniversary of the EU’s founding Treaty of Rome will be celebrated.

“Prime Minister May was very open and honest with me”, Tusk said of his visit to London on September 8.

Meanwhile thrice-bailed out Greece last week gathered mostly center and center-left southern European Union leaders in Athens to urge their northern counterparts to share more of the migrant burden and ease up on austerity.

At the top of the agenda was how to heighten security and improve defense cooperation, secure external borders to deal with chaotic immigration and come through on measures to get the vast ranks of unemployed youth in Europe back to work.

Millions of Europeans don’t feel safe at the moment, European Council President Donald Tusk said after the informal EU summit here on Friday.

The most recent proposals, drafted by President Juncker, call on the European Union to “establish permanent, structured co-operation in defence, including the creation of common battle groups to carry out military intervention in crises”.

“Protection, which is to say security; the preparation of the future, which means being able to be a great power on the global scale in terms of the economy and creating employment; and lastly to give hope to youth”.

Brexit was not formally discussed at Friday’s meeting, but the commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, reiterated the bloc’s stance at a press conference.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker insisted that the United Kingdom could not get access to the single market without accepting the free movement of workers.

Merkel did not downplay the seriousness of the situation that Europe now finds itself in. An EU official said the initial discussions had been “honest, without recriminations” while Tusk had submitted his “roadmap” in the afternoon session.

French President Francois Hollande, left, speaks with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, center, and Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel after a cruise on the Danube River as an event on the sidelines of an European Union summit.

The EU, he said, is ” determined to continue our cooperation with Turkey and the Western Balkans but also to establish migration pacts with African countries.to do everything possible to ensure internal security and fighting terrorism”.

In a further sign of the tensions over migration, Luxembourg’s foreign minister this week called for Hungary to be suspended from the bloc for treating refugees from war-torn Syria and other countries like “animals”. It is about the rights of ordinary people, of workers in Europe, so I can’t see any possibility of compromising on that very issue. “We are well prepared for negotiations and could even start tomorrow”. This is given. We have no choice but to solve them.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Europe needed to “stop sleep-walking in the wrong direction”.