It has been discussed for almost eight years, since the 2015 migration crisis. From 2020, after the devastating fire in the Moria camp on Lesvos, it was also negotiated. And as is often the case in Brussels, this week it took an all-nighter to come closer together under high pressure. When the long-awaited agreement on stricter border procedures and a more equal distribution of asylum seekers among the Member States was presented on Wednesday morning, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola rightly called it “historic”.
But then the questions come.
About the content. Southern countries, where many migrants arrive, must build centers where non-prospective migrants from ‘safe countries’ can wait for an accelerated procedure before they are deported. Can these be called ‘detention centres’? What will they look like? In recent years it has been very difficult to return migrants who have exhausted all legal remedies. Why would that work now, after that quick procedure?
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And about the shape. Because: isn’t the European asylum and migration pact a bow to the radical right? Isn’t the stricter policy also intended to halt the rise of populist anti-immigration parties in the Member States and in the European Parliament? Centre-right politicians, most recently the Belgian State Secretary for Asylum Nicole de Moor, hinted that the agreement should take the wind out of the sails of anti-immigration parties.
If so, does that even work?
Election strategy
Parliament President Metsola is certain. “This pact brings together the center and does not copy the right in any way,” she said during a press conference in Brussels. The solution found is “pragmatic,” she adds. Fabienne Keller, center-right MEP from France, feigns rhetorical surprise. “Are these proposals from the right? I can’t say that I saw many people from the far-right parliamentary group in the negotiating room. They always identify the problems, but they avoid finding solutions.” The Swedish rapporteur Tomas Tobé concludes: the migration pact “has never been a strategy for the next European elections for me.”
That will certainly be the case. If only because the new pact will not come into effect until 2026, notes political scientist Werner Krause of the University of Potsdam. And the European Parliament elections are next June. “It would be a bit too quick if the number of migrants has already decreased,” he says over the phone. The pact also attempts to provide an answer to what seems to be a wish of citizens in many European member states: to get a grip on migration – according to human rights organizations, but also, for example, the architect of the ‘Turkey deal’ in 2016, the Austrian sociologist Gerald Knaus, that the new agreement will change little in its final implementation.
According to Knaus, these are “false promises” that will ultimately play into the hands of the radical right. “With non-serious policies you completely open the door to populists,” he said from Bologna on Friday. According to him, agreements between some Member States with countries of origin, such as in 2016, are better than an “unworkable EU solution”. After all, the number of people trying to reach Europe illegally from North Africa in particular is relatively limited: 250,000 people so far this year, according to European Commissioner Ylva Johannson (Migration). “That number of people stands at the border between Mexico and the US every month.” It is, he says, “a crisis because so many people are drowning in the Mediterranean, not because there are so many trying to cross.”
The fact is that the political center is looking anxiously at next year’s European elections. The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats are still undisputedly the largest parties in polls. But the populist right-wing bloc, united in the Identity and Democracy group, is in the lead. I&D is according to the aggregated poll of polls by Politico the liberal group Renew Europe, of which the VVD and D66 form part from the Netherlands, is now over.
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Parties critical of migration have recently gained ground in many Member States. The PVV’s election win in the Netherlands has certainly given the radical right-wing international self-confidence. The aim, said Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini at the beginning of this month at a meeting in Florence where Geert Wilders also spoke via video, is to reach third place after June from the sixth group in the European Parliament, and thus be “decisive” if the two large center blocks are not aligned.
Copy or original
To prevent this, voters must be made clear that stricter immigration policy is also in good hands with the center-right. The only question is whether stronger language helps or hurts the political center. Werner Krause, the election researcher from Potsdam, thinks the latter. The cliché goes that voters generally prefer the original over the copy. And that’s true, it turns out his research into voting behavior and party positions in several European countries (including Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands) since 1970.
Center-right parties in particular have copied the harder line of emerging populist parties in recent decades.
“The idea was that you didn’t have to vote for those far-right parties if you wanted strict immigration policies,” says Krause. But the opposite is happening now: voters are moving to the radical right. “You show that the substantive positions of radical right-wing parties are no longer taboo and that it is therefore legitimate to vote for these types of parties.”
Last month’s Dutch parliamentary elections were of course exemplary of this. The VVD and Omtzigt have normalized migration as an election issue, says Maurits Meijers, who conducts similar research at Radboud University in Nijmegen. “It is understandable that parties are looking for an answer to a voter’s concern.”
But it often works the other way around too. “We know from literature that what political parties say and do also has a major influence on voters.” It’s a kind self-fulfilling prophecy: citizens are concerned about migration, politicians take over these concerns and talk more and more about migration, after which citizens become even more concerned about migration. “A party not only follows the voter, the voter often also follows the party.”
Few politicians see this more clearly than Marine Le Pen. When last week, after many detours, a stricter immigration law with the support of her radical right Rassemblement National received a majority in the French parliament, she dominated the afterthoughts. She claimed the new legislation as an “ideological victory” for her party. While she herself has been working on a friendlier image in recent years – a strategy of dediabolization, they say in France – the center-right took over its agenda. In the meantime, her party stands at 27 percent in the polls for the European elections and has a good chance of becoming president in 2027, when Emmanuel Macron is no longer eligible.
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The left-wing newspaper Liberation Macron delicately pointed out on the cover page that last year (and earlier in 2017) he presented himself as the center’s last lifebuoy that could prevent the dominance of the radical right. Now Le Pen had won after all, the newspaper wanted to say. This image was further reinforced when Macron’s Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne acknowledged that some measures introduced by the right-wing parliament may conflict with the constitution. She has asked the French Constitutional Council to take a closer look and adjust the parliamentary compromise where possible.
Krause: “In this way you are essentially telling voters that legislation does not necessarily have to be constitutional or in accordance with international treaties.” And that is what radical right parties also say. The Dutch information round between PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB on the question of whether a “common baseline” can be found for guaranteeing the Constitution, fundamental rights and the democratic constitutional state is an even more concrete example of this.
Nicolas Sarkozy
In any case, this move is not a sensible strategy for the center-right, says Meijers. The boundaries between the mainstream right and the radical right are often becoming increasingly diffuse. For example, last weekend when conservative British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appeared at a political festival of the radical right party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. In France, former MP Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece, has been trying for years to bring the ‘ordinary’ right and the radical right together.
The so-called issue ownership, the party that is associated with a certain issue, is not with the party that adopts the strong language on immigration. “You saw it in the Netherlands with the VVD and Wilders. If people have to choose who they trust when they have concerns about migration, they will choose Wilders.”
Krause sees a similar movement in Germany, where center parties want to get ahead of the fast-growing Alternative for Germany (AfD). “No matter how much centrist politicians try to focus the debate on labor migration that is necessary for the German economy, they are unable to do so, because the new laws mean that immigration can only be seen as something that is a problem and needs to be limited.”
A possible exception is Nicolas Sarkozy. He partly adopted the language of the then National Front (especially about the relationship between immigration and crime) and not only won the 2007 elections, but put the FN at zero seats in the subsequent parliamentary elections. Five years earlier, France was in turmoil because FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had reached the second round of the presidential elections for the first time.
Was Sarkozy’s copy perhaps better than the original? Krause has his doubts. “This was a short-term effect. In the longer term, you see, especially in France, that the center-right is marginalized. The radical right always wins this.”
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