“Welcome to the club.” Hungarian Prime Minister, ultra-nationalist Viktor Orbán, exuded schadenfreudegloating in German style, in welcoming the controversial decision of the government of the social democrat Olaf Scholz to impose, starting this Monday, temporary controls on all its borders, citing the migratory pressure that Germany is suffering and the need to protect itself from Islamist terrorism.
The announcement has set off alarm bells in several of its neighbours, such as Poland and Austria, who see one of the cornerstones of European integration, free movement in the Schengen area, in jeopardy, and in others such as Greece, who fear that it will increase migratory pressure in the entry countries. It also puts the unity of the EU to the test, while the increasingly widespread European extreme right celebrates it as a vindication of its anti-immigration positions. And it considers that the decision of the tripartite government of Scholz (social democrats, greens and liberals), taken after the rise of the ultra party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won at the beginning of the month in the regional elections in Thuringia and came second in Saxony, is another sign that the recently approved European Pact on Migration and Asylum, which had already been toughened in an attempt to curb the most extreme forces, was supposedly born out of date.
The leader of the National Rally (RN), Marine Le Pen, was quick to recall that it was her party that, during the European elections in June, called for the principle of a “double border” (EU and national) against irregular migration flows. “They explained to us, with a certain arrogance, that it was impossible. But today Germany is establishing it and showing that, with a little political will and a little courage, it is possible to control our borders,” she wrote in X with no less glee than her colleague Orbán, with whom she has just formed the ultra-European parliamentary group Patriots for Europe, which also includes Vox.
Orbán, who will attend the European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg this week to defend Hungary’s troubled presidency of the EU Council, has been threatening for weeks to send buses full of illegal immigrants to Brussels. “If Brussels wants migrants, we will give them to them. We will send them with a one-way ticket,” Budapest promises. Hungary also rejects a fine of 200 million euros imposed by the Court of Justice of the EU for violating the right to asylum during the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 and has counterattacked by demanding compensation from Brussels for the 2 billion euros it claims it has spent on “protecting the external border of the Schengen area.”
The Commission has unequivocally condemned the “unacceptable” Hungarian threat and warned of the consequences if it is carried out. Faced with the harshness towards Budapest, the European Executive, which must supervise each request for temporary closure of borders in the Schengen area, has been very cautious with Germany and has avoided any comment that could sound like criticism of Berlin, one of the European capitals with the most weight in Brussels. It has also not wanted to “speculate” on a potential domino effect in other countries. Something that, however, seems to have already begun.
Although the Netherlands has been one of the countries to protest the German decision, days later the government, in which the majority party of the extremist Geert Wilders participates, has taken a further step in its proclaimed intention to achieve “the strictest asylum policy that has ever existed”: it intends to declare, this week and for two years, an asylum crisis, which will allow it to make extraordinary decisions without asking for prior consent from Parliament. And it will formally request the voluntary exclusion of the Dutch from the common migration policy, something that promises another head-on clash with Brussels: as the Commission has repeatedly reminded, in matters of migration, the European treaties do not contemplate a clause to leave. In line with Berlin, The Hague will also defend strengthening border controls.
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Meanwhile, Le Pen, who holds the key to the fragile government of the new French Prime Minister, the conservative Michel Barnier, has already made it clear that she expects strong gestures on migration issues. Barnier himself, despite his long experience in Brussels (he was a European commissioner and negotiator for Brexit), already proposed during his frustrated presidential campaign in 2022 a controversial moratorium on the reception of immigrants and even promoting a national referendum to recover “freedom of manoeuvre” in this matter, as the French press recalled these days. Now he is considering re-creating the Immigration portfolio.
Temporary border controls within the Schengen area are not unusual: there are currently eight countries with temporary border controls (Germany, Austria, Denmark, Slovenia, France, Italy, Norway and Sweden). And since 2006, the European Commission has registered a total of 442 requests for this measure, which Brussels stresses should be a “last resort” and for “exceptional situations”.
However, Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor of European Law and Policies at the Paris School of Advanced Business Studies, believes that the German request is “qualitatively and quantitatively” different, because “it extends to all its borders and is not linked to a specific threat such as terrorism or a pandemic.”
The most serious thing, he says, is that this “exit from Schengen” has not been used as a last resort, as established by the rules, but “as another political option at its disposal, as if the Schengen code did not oblige the country.” And on top of that, he recalls by email, it has been carried out by a country like Germany, located in the centre of the EU and led by a government made up of political forces “historically more open than the right to freedom of movement and migration.”
The paradox is that it was a Christian Democrat, Angela Merkel, who opened the borders in 2015 because of the war in Syria, leading Germany to take in more than a million migrants, and that it is a Social Democrat who is now entrenched, harassed by the far right. All this when the influx of irregular migrants is more a perception than a reality: according to Frontex, the number of irregular entries into the EU fell by 39% in the first eight months of the year, with record falls on the Western Balkans route (77%) and the Central Mediterranean (64%).
Berlin’s risky move has another, even more worrying, ingredient, Alemanno added: it puts European unity at “risk” due to its ability to upset the internal balance of power in the EU and relations between member states. Because political motivations aside, he said, behind the border closure “there is something deeper at stake: the lack of trust between EU member states.” The decision means that “the German government coalition no longer trusts the ability of its nine neighbouring countries to monitor their borders,” so it “decided to suspend free movement to its territory.” Scholz himself said on Saturday at an event in Brandenburg that “unfortunately” Germany cannot trust that all its neighbours “do things as they should,” Efe reported.
The reaction of neighbours such as Poland – whose Prime Minister Donald Tusk has described the decision as “unacceptable” – or Austria, which has already made it clear that it will not accept migrants that Germany rejects at its borders, shows that these countries “are not prepared to pay the price of the German decision and that they are ready to retaliate”. A “logic of reciprocity”, says Alemanno, “completely alien to the functioning of the EU and which risks putting its unity in danger”. Something especially serious in these times of rise of the most Eurosceptic forces.
