By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
European liberals were battered by the populist wave that began in 2023 with Geert Wilders’s surprise election victory in the Netherlands. It continued through 2024 with state elections in Germany, local elections in the Czech Republic, the Freedom Party’s first-place finish in Austria, and the collapse of the French government.
As a result of a massive failure to manage migration policy and its consequences, the political establishment in country after country is losing ground to radical movements on the right.
Meeting in Brussels last October, European Union leaders faced a groundswell of demands for tightening their borders and making the bloc a more hostile destination for migrants and asylum seekers, following this recent surge in support for anti-immigrant parties.
The most prominent topic was migration, with EU leaders agreeing on a shift in the European Council’s approach to the issue. The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, acknowledged this was a major challenge. He indicated the gathering would “focus on concrete measures to prevent irregular migration including strengthened control of our external borders, enhanced partnerships and reinforced return policies.”
The tenor of the debate was a far cry from 2015, when the EU was faced with a migration crisis. Well over a million migrants and refugees, mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, sought help then. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU’s dominant national leader at the time, famously said, “We can manage that.”
The real pressure on municipalities and the sense of chaos and disorder, however, benefited the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which entered the federal parliament for the first time in 2017 and became the largest opposition party. It still is, as an election approaches.
Things calmed down somewhat after that. But numbers began to rise again more recently. In the first half of 2024, the EU received 513,000 applications for asylum. This was the same as in the previous year, which was the most since the 2015–2016 refugee crisis. At the end of June 2024, there were 925,000 cases awaiting a first instance decision.
Nationalist rhetoric is no longer confined to the fringes of the political spectrum across the EU. Anti-immigrant sentiment today features dominantly in public debates, after years of populists amplifying cultural anxieties and accusing governments of having lost control of their sovereign borders.
In recent months, nearly a dozen European countries have instituted some form of border restrictions to deter migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Poland last October announced a temporary halt to processing asylum requests from migrants arriving from neighbouring Belarus, invoking a security threat. Germany’s Olaf Scholz instituted border controls last summer to stop undocumented migrants from crossing into Germany. Six other countries, including Italy, France and Austria, have introduced border checks.
Most EU governments have chosen to appease anti-migrant sentiment. A rights-based vision of migration and asylum has become a political vulnerability, replaced with a security approach stressing law and order.
The passage of the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum in May 2024 represents the first major policy agreement in over a decade, intended to accelerate procedures and enhance cooperation and solidarity between member states. It calls for higher walls for “Fortress Europe” and tougher rules for asylum-seeking refugees.
The follow-up October gathering focused on concrete measures to prevent irregular migration, including strengthened control of external borders and reinforced return policies for migrants. EU leaders spent hours discussing migrant processing centres, speedier deportations and “hybrid warfare” by hostile powers using migrants to destabilize EU countries.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told journalists “there is a desire to work on pragmatic solutions.” In a novel move, she concluded a new partnership with Albania, a non-EU country, under which Italy would send up to 36,000 asylum applicants per year to process their claims externally.
“Mass illegal immigration is a phenomenon no EU member state can handle alone,” Meloni told a joint news conference in Rome with her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, in November 2023.
The Netherlands is mulling a plan that would send rejected asylum seekers to Uganda. “We see that there is a different mood in Europe,” Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof declared at the October conference.
“A great number of Europeans are tired of us helping people from outside who commit crimes,” maintained Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. “It can’t go on like this. Therefore, there is a limit as to how many people we can help.”
“The peoples of Europe have had enough of illegal migration, failed economic policies and the bureaucrats in Brussels,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared. He even recently threatened to send buses of migrants to Brussels
Speaking to reporters after the one-day summit, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said EU leaders had discussed the idea of “developing return hubs outside the European Union” for people with no right to stay.
“If you listen to Orban and Meloni at times and others like Marine Le Pen over the years, the rhetoric has been as harsh and as virulent as what we hear from politicians like Trump in the United States,” maintains Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
So is the lifeboat full? And all this was before Europe faced a new “Trump America.”
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