Delegates at a gathering of EU leaders were forced to drop a declaration on migration that diplomats are understood to have been preparing for weeks.
Poland and Hungary forced delegates to remove the passage in a last-minute row over migration during a meeting in Grenada, Spain.
At the end of Friday’s EU summit, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who faces a parliamentary election on October 15, said he had been partly responsible for the change.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter: “I expressed our position very strongly in the plenary and decided to veto the part of the bill that concerned migration.”
Meanwhile, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán used very strong language when describing his dissent.
He claimed Poland and Hungary were “pushed” by other EU members to sign off on an EU migration reform plan earlier this week, but refused to endorse any compromise position while in Granada.
He said: “After this, there is no chance to have any kind of compromise and agreement on migration … because legally we are raped.
“If you are raped, legally, forced to accept something you don’t like, how would you like to have a compromise and an agreement? It’s impossible.”
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte attempted to downplay the divisions among EU members.
He said the discussion regarding migration wasn’t that “big”, arguing it was primarily a domestic policy issue with Poland and Hungary.
Mr Rutte accused Mr Orbán of liking to “create upheaval and bedlam”, while he attributed Mr Morawiecki’s statements to his upcoming election.
He said the migration deal was in their interest as it “increases control on outer borders.”
Migration remains a key issue for the bloc. Last month tension rose between Germany and Italy when the former insisted it would not take in any migrants until the latter had taken “it’s share”.
Berlin had pledged voluntarily to take in 3,500 migrants to help other EU states, an Interior Ministry spokesperson said yesterday, and has taken in over 1,700 under the scheme.
But now Germany then pointed the finger at Italy, saying it has “for some time” stopped receiving migrants returned from Germany under the Dublin Regulations.
Following several months of deadlock, EU members agreed Wednesday on the final part of a migration deal.
This would toughen measures against illegal migration, as well as introduce an agreement to distribute arriving migrants among EU members.
The declaration also referred to the idea of enlargement but gave no specific mention of Ukraine or any other countries vying to join the bloc.
It statement read that “enlargement is a geostrategic investment in peace, security and prosperity”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pushed to alter how the EU takes decisions, saying “we need important decisions with only a qualified majority” – rather than through unanimity of all EU leaders, as is the current method.
