Agreed, on paper, in terms of future goals, but at odds over how to face one of the most immediate challenges, immigration. The European leaders ratified yesterday in Granada the commitment to the next great expansion of the Union towards the east and the reinforcement of the strategic autonomy of the continent, but they were forced to admit that in this great consensus there is no hottest topic of the moment.
Despite the general joy over the agreement reached this week in the Council on the last pending regulation of the pact, which will allow negotiations to be opened with the Eurochamber to agree on the final text, the incendiary rhetoric of the leaders of Hungary and Poland when they arrived at the informal European Council held in the Andalusian city made it clear from the first moment that there was no room for compromise.
The comparison chosen by the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, to express his Government’s refusal to assume the legal consequences of the future black pact, such as welcoming immigrants who have arrived in the Mediterranean countries in the event of a crisis, was particularly unfortunate. “If they rape you, in legal terms, and force you to accept something you don’t want, how can there be an agreement? It’s impossible,” Orbán said in a defiant tone, refusing to accept that decisions on migration policy can be approved by a qualified majority, that is, without the support of all member states.
The Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, for his part, accused the EU of trying to introduce “a system of distribution of illegal immigrants” between different European countries. His Government will not apply the reform “for reasons of national security”, he warned, before linking immigration and crime. “We are not afraid of the diktat of Brussels and Berlin”, added the Polish ultra-nationalist leader, who in a week will submit to the verdict of the polls in a disputed election against the Civic Platform candidate, Donald Tusk, the candidate of popular Europeans.
Faced with threats to veto the Granada Declaration, a document that condenses the Union’s strategic agenda for the coming years, including enlargement, the only solution to push it forward was to exclude the paragraphs referring to the immigration and publish it as a statement by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
This text states that immigration “is a European challenge that requires a European response” and reiterates that the irregular arrival of people “must be addressed immediately and decisively”. “We will not allow smugglers to decide who enters the EU. We will continue to implement all our decisions effectively and quickly”, says the text, too soft for the pretensions of Warsaw and Budapest. The declaration “has the support of a significant number of countries”, emphasized Michel.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was elected with a strong anti-immigration speech and has helped shift the Council’s position on the issue further to the right, said she “understood” the position of Hungary and Poland, but endorsed the agreement and added that the differences with the Eastern partners are due to the different geographical situation. “Today we found that 27 countries have agreed on the fact that the priority must be to stop illegal immigration”, celebrated the Italian far-right leader.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was unimpressed by Orbán and Morawiecki’s threats and instead celebrated that after “many years” of blockade “something common has developed”. The Pact on Migration and Asylum “lays the foundations for legislation that creates binding rules for the Twenty-Seven that cannot be blocked by isolated countries”, said Scholz, who trusted to resolve the current confrontation with the Italian government for German subsidies to oenagés that pick up immigrants in the Mediterranean. “Everyone knows that Germany is the country that has admitted the most refugees, despite not having an external border. In many cases they have been allowed to pass without registering them”, he recalled.
European diplomatic sources believe that, despite the bad impression caused by the attitude of Hungary and Poland at the summit, the “lesson” of Granada is that, “with its refusal to have the minimum declaration of the Twenty-seven , they have achieved the opposite of what they intended”, since they have made it clear that the decisions “will always be taken by qualified majority in the Council and never in the European Council [where they have veto power], because they will always block them”.
To the question of how the situation can be re-directed and avoid repeating the fiasco that took place after the migration wave of 2015, when the countries of the East refused to implement the decisions on the distribution of refugees approved without their support to the Council, both Michel and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, bet to remain firm in the orientation of the immigration reform in force. All the measures point to a tightening of conditions for access to the EU, greater control of external borders, stricter return policies and agreements with third countries to slow down departures.
The debate on European immigration and asylum policy has taken on a “toxic” character, says analyst Camino Mortera-Martínez, head of the European office of the Center for European Reform (CER), a London-based think tank. , Brussels and Berlin. The lack of consensus on the subject has direct consequences on other aspects of European integration, he warns. “Immigration is an existential issue for the EU, because it is an inextricable component of the Schengen area”, the area of ??free movement of people. And this process, the enlargement, “is underway and most of the member states accept it as a matter that cannot be stopped, even if some did wish, perhaps, that it was not so automatic”.
Granada’s statement, the first stop of the trio of appointments scheduled until the end of December to address decisions on the expansion of the club, sets for the first time the master lines of the process, which has been brutally accelerated by the war Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and conditions it on internal reforms, without setting an indicative date to carry it out, as Michel had proposed. “In view of the perspective of an enlarged Union, both the EU and the future member states must accelerate reforms, especially in the area of ??the Rule of Law, in line with a merit-based process” in which the EU must make its own “preparations” and “reforms”.
Von der Leyen went further. On the financial impact of the enlargement for the current member states, which a Council report raises to 256,000 million euros, he clarified that the EU does not intend to keep intact the current distribution of agricultural and cohesion aid when they enter new countries “We must bear in mind that we cannot simply extrapolate our policies from today to the next decades, it is impossible”, said the president of the European Commission, who marked distances with the aforementioned document. European leaders have asked the Community Executive to present estimates and projections. “We have to work on different scenarios and different figures”, he added, who reiterated that “all the expansions” have contributed to raising the standard of living not only of the new members, but of the countries that are already part of the club.
When asked about Spain’s position and the impact of Ukraine’s entry, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, admitted that it is “obvious” that “complex questions that will require political will” will have to be answered, but he evoked the experience of joining the club in the 1980s and reiterated support for the process. “How should we oppose other countries that have been knocking on the door for many years being able to join the Union. Without a doubt, we are a country always prone and open” to expansion, said Sánchez.
