Juncker backs Merkel's plan
European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker backed Angela Merkel's welcoming stance towards migrants yesterday ahead of a mini-summit of leaders this weekend aimed at tackling record arrivals.
Juncker's comments came as Slovenia warned it could build Europe's latest border fence to stem the world's biggest migration crisis since World War II, unless it gets more help from the summit.
Hostility towards migrants streaming into Europe is mounting, with Germany on Thursday foiling an extremist plot to torch migrant shelters and Swedish police saying a sword attack on a school with many immigrant pupils was motivated by racism.
More than 670,000 migrants came to Europe this year.
Merkel's open-door policy faces a backlash as Germany braces for up to a million asylum requests this year, but Juncker said that "I appreciate very much that the Chancellor does not change course because of opinion polls".
"It is not a question of short-term popularity but the very substance of what politics is about," Juncker, who is hosting today's mini-summit on migration, was quoted as telling the Funke-Mediengruppe press group about Merkel.
In a sign of the growing stress on Germany, police in the southern town of Bamberg arrested 13 members of a far-right movement suspected of planning arson attacks on two homes for asylum seekers, prosecutors said Thursday.
Sweden is the EU's other top destination for asylum seekers, and police there said a sword-wielding man who killed two people at a school in the southwestern town of Trollhattan was a "racially motivated" hate crime.
A country of 9.8 million, Sweden expects to receive up to 190,000 asylum applications this year.
Greece meanwhile saw a record 48,000 arrivals in the past week, most of them coming by sea from Turkey, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
Slovenia has become the main entry point into the European Union's passport-free Schengen zone from the increasingly crowded Balkan route after Hungary sealed its southern borders few weeks earlier.
More than 47,500 people have entered the small Alpine nation, which has a population of just two million, since October 17 when Budapest shut its frontier with Croatia, barely a month after also closing its Serbian border.
The worrying new figures raised the pressure ahead of Sunday's meeting in Brussels grouping the leaders of Macedonia and Serbia along with the leaders of eight countries from the 28-nation EU: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia.
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