I was looking forward to a holiday this summer, but the months leading up to it were no picnic for anyone interested in migration and politics in general. After the European elections and the “limited” success of the far right, the “roller-coaster” French legislative elections, or the racist riots in the UK, I was looking forward – naively, it so happens – to a return to boredom.
Alas, migration news seems to indicate that a return to normality is now impossible. So let’s take a quick tour of the new season’s main events.
Germany gets mired in migration
In Germany, the attack in Solingen, which left three people dead and several injured, as well as the historic score of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the regional elections in Thuringia (32.8 percent, 32 seats out of 88), have plunged the federal government into a frenzy of anti-migration measures.
The German executive had already caused controversy by deporting 28 convicted Afghan nationals to Afghanistan after two months of negotiations with the Taliban government via Qatar.
Now it intends to temporarily extend control of the country’s land borders. This decision, as Christian Jakob writes for Die Tageszeitung, takes no account of the real situation at Germany’s borders: “The right and the conservatives like to claim that we are facing ‘chaos’ and ‘loss of control’, that we don’t know what’s going on, that terrorists and major criminals can simply stroll in”. For Jakob, “those who keep hearing the same official arguments as to why controls must be carried out again within the EU […] must think that the situation was exactly as the right-wing extremists claim”. According to Jakob, such measures are likely to cause a domino effect, worsening the situation at Europe’s external borders.
In France, a Prime Minister who is “tough on immigration”
In France, President Emmanuel Macron (Renaissance, centre-right) has caused a scandal (or saved France, depending on who you ask) by appointing Michel Barnier, former MP, minister and Brexit negotiator, as Prime Minister. In so doing, he put an end to a political crisis brought on by the last general election, by casting his lot, not with the candidate proposed by the left-wing majority (193 seats out of 577), but with a “consensus” politician (for the right, in any case).
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But as “consensual” as he may be, Michel Barnier is nonetheless a “hardliner on immigration”, as Matthieu Aron explains for Le Nouvel Obs: “During the primary election organised by the Republicans to pick their presidential candidate for 2022, […] Michel Barnier caused a shock by proposing a ‘moratorium on immigration’. At the time, he advocated ‘putting a stop to the excesses, the laisser-aller’, and a ‘three- to five-year pause’ to curb unconditional regularisations, family reunification and long-stay visas. He also suggested organising a referendum so that France could set ‘immigrant quotas’ and ‘regain its room for manoeuvre’ vis-à-vis Europe.”
An Orbánian escapade and a response from Brussels
Between Belgium and the EU on the one hand, and Hungary on the other, tempers are once again frayed. For several weeks now, Hungary has been threatening to dispatch busloads of migrants directly to Brussels. The origin of the dispute? A call to order from the EU Court of Justice, which is fining Hungary no less than 200 million euro for failing to comply with European asylum law, as Sára Anna Pupli explains for the Hungarian media outlet Telex.
In response to a dish it deems unpalatable, Hungary is now threatening to deliver the refugees to the Brussels elites who “invite them into Europe”, to quote Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s political director. Orbán was quoted in Index, a formerly independent media outlet that has been bought by a figure close to the government.
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In Belgium, Hungary’s plan has motivated a revealing political sequence, made up of spats between Belgian politicians, calls to block buses at the border, and criticism of the “bien-pensante left” unaware of the “real effects of its policies”, Ugo Santkin reports in Le Soir.
This dispute also reveals the Europe-wide generalisation of the methods used by governments to deal with migrants and migration. “Unravelling Europe, undermining the Union? Yes, but in reality, many of the EU countries that express their outrage are attempting, mutatis mutandis, their own version of this rejection,” says Béatrice Delvaux, chief editorialist at Le Soir, in response to Olaf Scholz’s change of attitude towards asylum seekers. While this rejection is certainly embodied by “the Hungarians, with its buses that will dump unwanted migrants in Brussels”, but also, whatever they may say, by “Belgium, in an admittedly softer version, with negotiators [for the future government coalition] agreeing on a half-billion euro cut in the asylum budget”. Delvaux adds, somewhat bitterly, that “electoral urgency and the fear of extremes are making governments run like headless chickens, with migrants as their outlet.”
Necessity makes law
Few countries embody the political commotion surrounding migration better than Poland. While the current government was elected on the promise of restoring democracy after almost a decade of rule by the far-right Law and Justice party (PiS), its handling of migration raises a host of questions. This summer, the Polish parliament approved legislation to exclude from the penal code, under certain conditions, the criminal liability of officers stationed at the border with Belarus if they use their weapons: in other words, permission to fire live ammunition in “self-defence” or as a means of “prevention”. Katarzyna Przyborska, in Krytyka Polityczna, sums up the main concerns about the legislation: “who will judge the decisions made by a soldier? The military police, who have recently been scolded by politicians? Officers of other services? Or the shooter himself? MPs have argued that we simply need to trust soldiers and officers.”
For the Polish journalist, the majority of people defending the legislation are contributing to a state of widespread violence. “These statements by MPs go round the world, as the country’s fascists, emboldened by anti-migrant language and the actions of a democratic government supposedly upholding the rule of law, are gathering to ‘patrol’ the forests at the border,” Przyborska warns. “[The government] has paved the way for violence that will only intensify.”
