Heat on Angela Merkel at summit

A child is carried off the rescue vessel Lifeline after it docked in Malta. Photo / AP

Angela Merkel was under fire at home and abroad as European Union leaders prepared to meet in Brussels today for a crunch summit to resolve their differences over the bloc's three-year migrant crisis.

The German chancellor was to arrive in Brussels with her Bavarian CSU coalition partners still threatening to pull down her Government and Italy and other eastern EU states determined to defy her once unquestioned authority.

The EU summit comes after a turbulent week for Merkel that has exposed her vulnerability at home and apparently irreconcilable divisions in the EU over how to address the migrant crisis.

Before heading to Brussels, she defended her decision to open Germany's doors to migrants in 2015, saying it was a one-off humanitarian gesture to help relieve pressure on other European nations.

Speaking to Parliament, Merkel said the leaders of Austria and Hungary had personally appealed for help in 2015 as migrants streamed into their countries.

She recalled "we said in an exceptional situation we will help and now, as then, I think it was the right decision".

Merkel says the situation is now changed, and that Europe needs common solutions to the issue of migrants.

Donald Tusk, the European Council President, warned leaders that the debate was becoming "increasingly heated" and that the EU's failure to defend its borders was handing winning arguments to populists with a "tendency towards overt authoritarianism".

"The stakes are very high. And time is short," he wrote in his invitation letter to leaders that warned Europe's voters wanted to see leaders "restoring their sense of security".

Europe's internal divisions were highlighted again yesterday in horse-trading over how to deal with a rescue vessel in the Mediterranean carrying 230 migrants which had been refused permission to dock in Italy or Malta for the last six days.

Malta finally gave permission for the Dutch-registered Lifeline to dock, but only after eight EU states — France, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Malta — agreed to take a share of the migrants.

Malta's Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, said the situation was unique and could not be considered a blueprint for handling future rescues, while Theo Francken, the Belgian Minister for Asylum and Migration, said on Twitter that it must be a "one-off operation".

But Italy, which is demanding reforms to the EU's Dublin rule that requires migrants to be registered in the first EU country they land in, hailed it as a political victory for its campaign to share out all new arrivals.

Matteo Salvini, Italy's new hardline Interior Minister who has refused permission for NGO rescue ships to dock in Italy, heralded the deal as "another success of the Italian Government".

- Telegraph Group Ltd