East European group lobbies for 'reform' in EU's post-Brexit future

Four eastern European countries will stake out a joint position at next week's summit on the EU's post-Brexit future, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said on Tuesday.

The so-called Visegrad Group has "enormous potential... (and) a recipe for the EU," Szydlo said.

The European Union requires reforms "to bring it closer to its citizens," Szydlo said, without elaborating.

Prime ministers from Visegrad members Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland -- all EU states since 2004 -- met on the margins of an economic forum in the Polish town of Krynica and discussed the impact of Britain's vote on June 23 to leave the EU.

The consequences of the referendum will feature in an informal summit of 27 countries -- the entire bloc, minus Britain -- in the Slovak capital of Bratislava on September 16.

Nationalists in central and eastern Europe argue that Britain's shock vote shows citizens are disenchanted with the bloc, seeing it as aloof or driven by a federal political agenda.

Some of these figures have clashed with the European Commission, the EU's powerful executive, on migrants and human rights.

One of those critics, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said Brexit "offered the opportunity to correct mistakes by the EU," which he described as "rich but weak".

Slovakia, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, will host the summit. Its prime minister, Robert Fico, said the meeting will "launch a major process, a diagnostic on the health of the EU" and defining "a remedy to cure it".

The Visegrad leaders also met in Krynica with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, expressing support for Kiev's European goals, with Fico and Orban also calling for visa-free travel to the EU for Ukrainians.

"It's a moral issue," said Orban, adding that the EU had promised to take steps to bring Ukraine closer to the bloc.

"But over the past two years, nothing has happened," he complained.