Since Germany’s announcement in early September of the reintroduction of checks at its internal borders, Europe has brought the immigration debate back to the forefront. British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Italy to learn about the restrictive migration policy of Council President Giorgia Meloni. In mid-September, the Netherlands and Hungary officially asked the European Commission for a derogation to opt out of the common migration policy in the event of a treaty revision, while in Austria the subject dominated the legislative elections campaign.
In France, freshly appointed Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced on September 23 that he wanted to put an end to the “migratory disorder,” less than a year after the last restrictive law on the subject, while the Danish prime minister, the Social Democrat Mette Fredriksen, said: “We must unfortunately be very tough on immigration.” In Brussels, it can be summed up that there are no longer any taboos on this issue.
Why is there such a hardening of rhetoric, when undocumented arrivals have fallen by 39% since the start of 2024 (to 140,000 people) and the million annual asylum applications, admittedly at their highest level, remain modest compared to a continent of 450 million inhabitants? Right and left alike, European leaders have hardened up on the subject, and they do not hesitate to borrow the ideas that the far right has been putting forward for 40 years.
‘A way of polarizing the debate’
“From one country to another, these announcements are often linked to electoral sequences,” said Matthieu Tardis, a researcher at the Synergies Migrations think tank. “In Germany, the reintroduction of border controls came after a heavy defeat for the SPD (Social Democratic Party) in some Länder (German states) by the far-right AfD, as well as (after) tragic news stories (including the knife attack in Solingen by a Syrian refugee on August 23). In France, a firm stance on migration management is a strong political marker for the new government. It has become a totem and a way of polarizing the debate.”
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For Germany and Austria, “the recent announcements are the consequence of 10 years of very significant reception,” said Gerald Knaus, the Austrian president of the European Stability Initiative. “Between 2014 and 2023, Germany took in 35% of Europe’s asylum seekers, or 2.5 million people, and recognized 1.4 million of them as refugees. That’s almost half of all the refugees received in Europe.” In proportion to its population, Austria welcomed the largest contingent of refugees. “After large waves of arrivals, you always have a backlash, a return to a protectionist policy. This has been the case in the US after every major wave of migration,” said political scientist Ivan Krastev of the Sofia Center for Liberal Strategies.
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Publish date : 2024-10-06 08:00:00
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