The Czech Republic wants to be in the EU’s core, but without the common currency. Prague wants to focus on common defence instead. EURACTIV.cz reports.

French President Emmanuel Macron would like to meet twelve heads of European states in just ten days.

On Wednesday (23 August), he was invited to Salzburg by the Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, who hosted a meeting of the so-called “Slavkov triangle” with his counterparts from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The meeting was especially important to the Czechs. Macron plans to build an integrated core of the Union that could leave the other states on periphery.

The meeting in Salzburg suggested that Czechs want to go along with Macron, but under one condition: no common currency in the near future.

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Read also a commentary by Martin Ehl for tol.org. "..Western partners are too often not aware that issues like posted workers are among the few that make the EU acceptable in the eyes of average voters (who would still like to earn a buck to the West, even for lower pay). Pushing too hard for the change of the posted workers directive might help populists and nationalists in Central Europe, and increase the popularity of Eurosceptics", he writes.

Joint Statement of Prime Ministers of the Visegrad Group on on the Amendment of Posting of Workers Directive