Freedom of movement in the EU received another nail in its coffin yesterday after Poland became the latest European country to introduce checks along its shared borders with fellow member states. As of next Monday, Warsaw will start enforcing border controls at crossings shared with Germany and Lithuania.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that he felt compelled to introduce border checks in particular to \u2018reduce the uncontrolled flows of migrants across the Polish-German border to a minimum\u2019. The source of Tusk\u2019s angst is the tougher border regime introduced by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz less than two months ago. Under the new measures, German border guards have been given the power to stop and turn back anyone trying to enter the country without the correct paperwork. The federal police have also been granted the power to reject asylum seekers at the border if they have grounds to.<\/p>\n
Contrary to Tusk\u2019s accusation, the flow of migrants has been far from \u2018uncontrolled\u2019: according to the German authorities, just 3,488 migrants have been turned away at the country\u2019s shared border with Poland. But Tusk\u2019s barb speaks to the tension between Germany and Poland that has been growing for some time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Merz entered Berlin\u2019s chancellery in May off the back of a violence-soaked election campaign in which the debate over migration raged thanks to the inflammatory, yet effective, rhetoric of the far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD) party. More than 3 million asylum seekers have entered Germany in the past decade, placing a strain on crucial elements of the country\u2019s social infrastructure, piling fuel on the fire of the AfD\u2019s anti-migrant messaging and increasing the pressure on politicians in Berlin to be seen to tackle the issue.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Merz\u2019s predecessor Olaf Scholz was the first to deal a blow to the Schengen Area system when his government introduced \u2018temporary\u2019 border checks in the autumn of 2023. These measures were extended most recently in February this year. They seem to be working: the number of illegal migrants entering Germany dropped from a post-pandemic peak of 127,549 in 2023 to 83,572 last year, with German authorities hopeful that that number will drop again to just over 30,000 by the end of this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Merz made it a day one election promise to clamp down on illegal border crossings even further \u2013 not least to demonstrate to the nearly one in four Germans who voted for the AfD in February\u2019s election that their concerns over migration were being heard. Merz\u2019s legislation has not been without its controversy \u2013 his critics claim it breaches the EU constitution, while supporters say it is merely enforcing the terms of the EU\u2019s Dublin Agreement under which asylum seekers are obliged to seek refuge in whichever European country they first enter. Germany, of course, has no external EU borders.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In remarks certain to inflame tensions with Poland further, Merz hit back at Tusk yesterday: \u2018We currently have to implement border controls because the protection of Europe\u2019s external borders is not sufficiently guaranteed.\u2019<\/p>\n
\nTo have freedom of movement inside the bloc, the EU must protect its outer borders<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But just as in Germany, the issue of migration goes back further than just the last few months in Poland, and the country now finds itself squeezed on both sides. Since late 2023, the country has also been experiencing pressure along its eastern border, specifically the 250-mile stretch it shares with Belarus. The Belarusian and Russian authorities have for several years now been waging a campaign of \u2018weaponised migration\u2019 against the EU, encouraging migrants mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa to travel through their countries and attempt to cross into the bloc along their shared borders with EU member states, including Poland. According to the Polish authorities, over 30,000 migrants crossed into the country this way last year, a rise of 16 per cent on 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Migration featured heavily in Poland\u2019s presidential election last month, in which the conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, won. \u2018Order must be established on the western border,\u2019 Nawrocki said. As such, the domestic pressure is continuing to pile up on Tusk to combat the flow of migrants into Poland.<\/p>\n
This latest blow to the sacrosanctity of the Schengen Area by Poland shows the extent to which the EU and its leadership are beginning to strain under the pressure, both literal and political, of Europe\u2019s ongoing migrant crisis. It also suggests separately that Belarus \u2013 and its overlords in the Kremlin \u2013 are succeeding with their policy of attempting to sow chaos and instability throughout the continent by weaponising migration. Poland almost certainly won\u2019t be the last to buckle under the pressure to curb freedom of movement around the bloc.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The former German chancellor Angela Merkel made it known this week that she disapproved of Merz\u2019s new border regime. \u2018If someone says \u201casylum\u201d at the German border,\u2019 she said pointedly while meeting with a group of refugees at the start of the week, \u2018then they must first be subjected to a procedure \u2013 right at the border, if you like, but a procedure.\u2019 But, as the tenth anniversary of her now-infamous open-doors asylum policy and rallying cry \u2018Wir schaffen das\u2019 approaches next month, the irony is not lost that, through her policies, this most Europhilic of politicians could be responsible for the bloc\u2019s weakening \u2013 if not total collapse.<\/p>\n
Merz and Tusk\u2019s war of words gets to the nub of the problem the EU faces when it comes to dealing with the migration crisis it has now been experiencing for close to ten years. It is becoming increasingly clear that to have freedom of movement inside the bloc, the EU must protect its outer borders with a ferocity it can\u2019t \u2013 or won\u2019t \u2013 deliver. Until that moment comes, Merz has made the first move and made Germany\u2019s position clear: it is every man for himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Freedom of movement in the EU received another nail in its coffin yesterday after Poland became the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,1824,770],"class_list":{"0":"post-231216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-germany","12":"tag-poland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114782054837697421","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}