As the October 17-18 meeting of EU leaders approaches, an axis of right-wing and populist governments and parties in Central Europe has been flexing its muscles on migration.
Immigration will be front and centre of the EU summit on October 17-18 after the European Commission buckled under pressure from member states to explore further steps to curb irregular migration.
The past week has seen EU governments of all stripes, including those dominated by far-right and populist parties, many in the eastern part of the bloc, press the European Commission to promise further action on illegal migration.
This culminated in the Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, sending a letter to European capitals on Monday saying the bloc should look into the idea of “developing return hubs outside the EU” to speed up deportations of failed asylum seekers.
The letter followed an October 7 document signed by 17 European governments, including the Czech and Slovak ones, calling for a “paradigm shift” in the bloc’s migration policy, a strengthening of the external borders, and a radical toughening of the return procedures for asylum seekers who’ve had their applications turned down.
Later that week, on October 12, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, seen as a centrist leading a liberal-democratic government, announced the suspension of asylum rights due to pressure on its border with Belarus, which is being caused by the regime of President Aleksandr Lukashenko bussing tens of thousands of migrants to its borders with the EU and herding them across to foment a crisis.
The Hungarian government of Viktor Orban has traditionally taken a tough line on immigration and has been loudly proclaiming recently that its dire predictions about the viability of the EU’s passport-free zone and migration policies are coming true.
“Since 2015, I have been called either an idiot or an evil person for my stance on migration. But, at the end of the day, everyone will agree with me,” Orban told reporters at his international press conference in Strasbourg last week.
Orban has been campaigning for a “fortress Europe” for almost a decade and built a 175-kilometre-long fence on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia in the wake of the 2015 migration crisis, when the continent saw a huge influx of refugees and migrants into Europe, namely from the Middle East.
Orban has been at loggerheads with both the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) over the breaching of European laws on asylum by his nationalist-populist government, in the process losing several cases at the ECJ for inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and migrants.
The right to asylum is considered a fundamental human right in international law, originating in the 1951 Convention on Refugees. It is also enshrined in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Yet Orban’s isolation within the EU over the issue has been lessening of late as he gains new allies in the region and beyond.
Newest to his club is Austria, where the anti-immigration far-right FPÖ party won the September 29 general election, although it might not get the chance to govern.
A year earlier, the populist Robert Fico regained power in Slovakia after winning the election there and forming a coalition with two other parties, one of them the extreme-right Slovak National Party.
In Czechia, the populist ANO party of former premier Andrej Babis looks poised to retake power in next year’s general election, possibly in league with the far-right SPD.
Further west, in 2023, Orban’s longtime friend Geert Wilders, campaigning on a tough anti-immigration line, won the election in the Netherlands. And this year, the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen came first in the European Parliament elections in France.
In recent regional elections, Germany was shocked by the far-right AfD’s outright success in Thuringia, and its second place in Saxony and in Brandenburg. The election results have put pressure on the ruling coalition in Berlin, which swiftly reinstated temporary controls at its external borders to appease the right.
“Major European countries are hardening their stance towards migration. Even the last two bastions of liberal policies, like Sweden and Germany, are introducing controls,” Viktor Marsai, director of Hungary’s Migration Research Institute, a conservative think tank which is part of the government-close Mathias Corvinus College (MCC), tells BIRN.
Andras Lederer from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog, agrees governments elected over the past year across Europe are those that “favour restrictions on migration and asylum policies”.
Taking the credit
Whether this shift in thinking is really down to Orban’s efforts is something few are willing to admit.
Marsai from the Migration Research Institute believes that Europe has simply been overwhelmed by irregular migrants, and in some Western countries their numbers have become unmanageable, even though migration flows are well below those of the record year in 2015.
“There are 3.5 million refugees, asylum seekers and people under temporary protection in Germany. Of those who arrived in 2015-16, only 50-60 per cent managed to find a job. Migration has become a burden on society and mainstream politicians need to address it somehow, otherwise it will be left entirely to the far right,” Marsai warns.
He argues that migration is not only a humanitarian challenge, but also a security issue. “We need screening at the border, because we need to know who we are letting in,” he says.
Originally, this week’s European Council meeting was supposed to focus on support for Ukraine and the EU’s competitiveness problems. But 14 member states, including Germany, France and Italy, insisted that migration be put high on the agenda.
This comes just five months after the EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact was adopted after four years of intense negotiations. The pact, a compromise between hardliners and liberal-left forces that will come into force in June 2026, provides for mandatory border procedures (transit zones) for asylum seekers from countries with low acceptance rates, an enhanced solidarity mechanism between member states, a common data system for asylum seekers, and stricter return policies for those whose asylum applications are rejected. Two countries – the Netherlands and Hungary – have already signalled that they will seek an opt-out.
“The migration pact itself shows a hardening of migration policy in Europe,” Lederer of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee tells BIRN.
But he sees no real chance of an opt-out for some member states. “Nobody wants to open this Pandora’s box again,” he says, admitting that even in its current form the migration pact would be a step forward for Hungary, where it is currently impossible to file an asylum application.
“The migration pact was one of the grand projects of [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen’s first commission, but unfortunately it will not really work in practice,” Marsai predicts pessimistically. “It does not provide an answer to one of the key problems, which is repatriation. It takes two to tango, and most African and Middle Eastern countries are not keen on cooperating to take back irregular migrants deported from the EU.”
Some countries have already decided to take matters into their own hands. Italy has struck a deal with Albania to open hotspots to process applications outside its territory, and Germany is negotiating deals with Georgia and Kenya to send asylum seekers there. Meanwhile, Orban is threatening the EU with bussing migrants to Brussels in protest at its policies, even though this would be a violation of Hungarian and European law.
“Orban is deliberately keeping migration on the agenda to test how far he can go in the EU. He is using it as a tool to undermine common policies and defy European rules in general,” Lederer concludes.
Pole position
Polish Prime Minister Tusk announced his government’s plans to introduce a “territorial, temporary suspension of the right to asylum” during a convention of his party, Civic Coalition, on Saturday.
The measure, he claimed, was necessary to address the migration crisis on Poland’s eastern border with Belarus. “I will demand recognition of this decision in Europe, because we know very well how Lukashenko, [Vladimir] Putin and people smugglers use the right to asylum contrary to its essence,” Tusk said on Saturday.
In his speech, Tusk effectively positioned his party in opposition to the previous government led by the nationalist-populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, whom he ironically accused of being “pro-immigration” for allowing illiberal immigrants to come into the country via the Belarus border as well as foreign workers on illegally obtained visas.
Analysts saw the speech as kicking off the party’s campaign for the presidential election next May, in which the issue of security will feature prominently.
A temporary suspension of the right to asylum to deal with an immediate crisis situation is actually envisaged in the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum. However, the understanding in the legislation is any suspension would be short-lived, lasting a few weeks, which is not what Tusk plans. Moreover, Tusk has been one of several EU leaders to reject the pact: referring to the agreement, Tusk said on Saturday that Poland “would not implement European ideas if we are sure they threaten our security”.
On Monday, the European Commission appeared to criticise Tusk’s move to suspend the right to asylum on the border with Belarus.
“It is important and imperative that the Union is protecting the external borders and, in particular, from Russia and Belarus who are undermining the security of the EU member states and of the Union as a whole,” a European Commission spokesperson said in Brussels. “At the same time, member states have international and EU obligations, including the obligation to provide access to the asylum procedure.”
Countering the hybrid attack from the east and ensuring the right to asylum should not be “mutually exclusive”, the spokesperson added.
Reading the room
In Czechia too, the political mood is veering towards a populist right and far right for whom migration, and the need to adopt a tougher stance on expulsions and relocations, is taking centre stage just one year out from the next parliamentary election.
After two big election wins this year (European and regional) that also saw governing parties under-performing, with support for the most liberal ones plummeting, it is Andrej Babis’s ANO party that’s setting the increasingly hard anti-immigration line defining the Czech political landscape.
In a bid to attract as many far-right voters as it can to reduce the risks of having to govern with more moderate parties should victory come in 2025, ANO has for months concentrated its attacks on the EU migration pact, which the billionaire former prime minister soberly described as a “huge betrayal” that would lead to the “insidious disease” of mass illegal migration, “a cancer that is destroying European society”.
“We have to deploy armed forces all over the beaches of southern Europe,” he further argued shortly after his ANO party quit the centrist and liberal Renew grouping in the European Parliament to found the Patriots for Europe alongside Orban’s Fidesz and Herbert Kickl’s FPÖ, among other far-rightists.
For what it may lack in originality, this rhetoric makes up in efficiency in a country where anti-refugee sentiment runs among the highest in Europe, and where xenophobic and racist statements – specifically against asylum seekers and migrants from North Africa or the Middle East – have been a constant for years, to be toned down or reactivated at will depending on the electoral mood.
Czechia truly stands out in “how much we consider [migration] to be dangerous”, surmises Maria Jelinkova of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University.
While other Czech opposition parties, from the far-right SPD to the nondescript populist Motorists and Prisaha, double down on ANO’s rhetoric, the centre-right government of Prime Minister Petr Fiala finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place, forced not to dismiss the EU’s migration pact altogether – it abstained from its approval in the spring – while showing that they, too, can talk tough.
“We want Europe to take the migration pact as a springboard for fundamental reforms,” Interior Minister Vit Rakusan has argued. He said last week that Prague was confident the EU Commission would heed its call, including through the support of the next European commissioner for migration, Austria’s Magnus Brunner, and Czechia’s own Jozef Sikela, who got the portfolio for international cooperation.
Against the backdrop of growing geopolitical chaos in the Middle East, and with less than 12 months to go before the next general election, Czech political parties – government and opposition alike – are expected to continue flexing their muscles on migration; the former to ensure its survival, the latter in the hope of joining Central Europe’s emboldened axis of illiberal forces.