In 2015, when more than 1.3 million people headed to Europe, mostly fleeing a brutal war in Syria, the response of Germany’s then chancellor, Angela Merkel, was to say “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”), and open the country’s borders.
Less than a decade later, and faced with a flow of irregular arrivals less than 10% of what it was at the peak of the bloc’s migration crisis, EU capitals are increasingly saying, “No, we can’t”. Or, perhaps more accurately, “We won’t”.
Under intense political pressure from far-right parties in power in half a dozen member states and advancing with almost every election in others, governments are outdoing each other in introducing tough anti-immigration measures.
This month alone, Germany reintroduced checks at all its land borders, France vowed to restore “order on our frontiers”, the Netherlands announced its “toughest ever” regime, and Sweden and Finland proposed harsh anti-migrant laws.
The mood risks straining EU ties and could endanger not just the bloc’s new asylum and immigration pact, recently finalised after nearly a decade of fraught negotiations, but its prized free-movement Schengen zone.
Marcus Engler, of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, said: “It’s hyperactive. It’s one restriction after another, with no impact assessments and no evidence they will actually work. They’re clearly driven by electoral logic.”
The number of people recorded arriving as irregular immigrants in the EU between January and the end of July was 113,400, a fall of about 36% year on year.
Long seen as one of the bloc’s most open members, Germany also recently tightened asylum and residency laws, reduced welfare benefits for some refugees and resumed deporting Afghan nationals for the first time since the Taliban took power in 2021.
The fragile three-party Socialist-led coalition, trailing far behind its centre-right and far-right opposition in the polls, has insisted its reintroduction of checks this month on land borders would curb migration and “protect against the acute dangers posed by Islamist terrorism and serious crime”.
The move has been widely denounced as politically motivated after a series of knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers, and historic successes in crunch state elections by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
At the European level, it was seen in many – though not all – capitals as a potentially far-reaching blow to the 27-nation, passport-free Schengen zone, considered one of the EU’s biggest and most economically important achievements.
“It’s a kind of a trap,” a diplomat from one EU member state said. “Once you introduce this kind of measure with no real practical justification, how do you sell to voters the notion, just a few months later, that it’s now somehow safe to reverse it?”
Support came from Hungary’s nativist government, which this month threatened to send a bus convoy of migrants to Brussels in protest against EU migration policies. “Welcome to the club,” said the prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
The Netherlands’ new coalition, led by the far-right, anti-immigration Freedom party (PVV), did likewise. It has this month promised “the strictest admission rules in the EU”, saying the country “can no longer bear the influx of immigrants”.
The four-party government plans to freeze new asylum applications, provide only basic accommodation, limit family reunification visas and accelerate forced returns. It also aims to declare an “asylum crisis” so it can take measures without MPs’ approval.
Once-welcoming Sweden, whose minority rightwing coalition is propped up by the far-right Sweden Democrats, has this month proposed raising the amount it pays to people willing to return home from €880 (£665) to €30,000 each.
Stockholm also has plans for a law obliging public sector workers to notify undocumented people to authorities, while Finland’s coalition, which includes the far-right Finns, wants to ban undocumented people from accessing non-emergency healthcare.
France’s new rightwing government – whose survival will depend on whether and when the far-right National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen decides to back any future no-confidence vote from the left – is also bent on a far tougher approach.
The prime minister, Michel Barnier, this week described immigration levels as “often insufferable”. Abolishing full healthcare for undocumented people who had been in France at least three months, as the RN has long wanted, was “not a taboo”, he said.
Barnier also praised “what a Socialist chancellor in Germany is doing” on border controls, calling it “a wake-up call for us”. His hardline interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said France should see “how far we can go” to institute permanent checks.
“The French people want more order: order in the streets, order at the borders,” Retailleau said in his first television interview, adding that Paris aimed to “review EU legislation that is no longer suitable”.
The contagious new mood, visible across the bloc, does not bode well for the future of the Schengen zone but could also threaten the EU’s new asylum and migration pact, finalised this spring after almost a decade of negotiations.
Criticised by rights groups who say it will increase suffering and reduce protection, the pact aims to strengthen external borders while spreading the financial and practical burden of resettlement.
The Netherlands and Hungary have already said they want opt-outs. Retailleau’s comments suggest France, too, may now be having second thoughts.
“Already, national governments are saying it’s not enough,” Engler said. “They want new rules to give them even more control ... Even Germany’s policymakers seem to have concluded it won’t really work.”
Perhaps most striking is a concerted move to promote offshore processing, along the lines of agreements signed by Denmark with Kosovo and Italy with Albania (together, in Rome’s case, with deals with leaders in Libya and Tunisia to reduce departures).
Fifteen member states, led by Austria, Denmark, Italy and the Czech Republic, have reportedly written to the European Commission calling on it “to identify, elaborate and propose new ways and solutions to prevent irregular migration to Europe”.
Outsourcing asylum reception and processing to countries outside the EU is one of the 15’s main objectives, along with a “common approach to returns”, notably to safe third countries or countries of origin including Syria and Afghanistan.
The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has promised such an approach. Gradually, said the EU diplomat, “the mood is changing. The language, the policies, are tougher. We’re discussing things no one would have dared say a decade ago.”
A pattern is clearly emerging, said Alberto Alemanno, a professor of EU law at the College of Europe. “A French rightwing government calling to make temporary border controls permanent.
“A German centre-left government de facto suspending Schengen. Migration deals à la Italy-Albania becoming the new modus operandi. And the migration pact ready to be renegotiated, as if it wasn’t strict enough … Who will counter this?”
Europe clearly faces very real migration challenges, Engler concluded. “But these are not solutions. Perhaps the influence of far-right parties has reached a critical point – the mainstream parties have no plan, but they’re freaking out.”
He added: “It took several generations of politicians to build the EU as a space of free movement and human rights. It seems the current generation of political leaders is intent on tearing it all down in the space of a few years.”
