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<\/p>\nHardly any political issue is as charged as migration policy. Across Europe \u2013 and beyond \u2013 xenophobic forces are gaining strength, accompanied by ever louder calls for isolation and border fortification. Politicians and parties advocating hard-line positions on refugees are enjoying a surge in popularity. This is evident in Germany, and also in Greece.<\/p>\n
In Thanos Plevris and Alexander Dobrindt, two political kindred spirits have found one another, aligned on core questions of migration policy. Plevris has served as Greece\u2019s migration minister in Athens since June of this year; Dobrindt has been Germany\u2019s interior minister in Berlin since May \u2013 and thus responsible for immigration policy as well. In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that the two are working in tandem to restrict migration to their countries and to maximize deportations \u2013 and, crucially, to do so through coordinated action.<\/p>\n
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German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt speaks, during a presentation of the new federal police drone defense unit, in Ahrensfelde, Germany, December 2, 2025. REUTERS\/Lisi Niesner<\/p>\n
Cooperation between the governments in Berlin and Athens on migration policy has been intensive for years; in scarcely any other policy area is it closer or more systematic. At the end of November, Plevris visited the German capital, and since then Athens and Berlin have jointly promoted the establishment of so-called \u201creturn hubs.\u201d These are special centers outside the European Union to which rejected asylum seekers from EU countries would be transferred, with the aim \u2013 ideally \u2013 of deporting them from there to their countries of origin. Even on this politically and legally contentious issue, Germany and Greece are now pulling in the same direction.<\/p>\n
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Earlier this week, Plevris and Dobrindt reached a surprise agreement on a long-running point of contention in migration policy that has weighed on bilateral relations for years: so-called secondary migration. At issue are roughly 100,000 refugees who, over time, initially entered Europe via Greece, were formally recognized there as refugees, but then moved on to Germany, where they submitted new asylum applications \u2013 and, to the irritation of German authorities, have refused to return.<\/p>\n
In recent years, scarcely a high-level German-Greek government meeting passed without the German side demanding the return of these \u201csecondary migrants\u201d \u2013 and just as regularly, Athens rebuffing those demands. On the sidelines of the EU interior ministers\u2019 meeting in Brussels, an agreement has now been reached on this long-blocked issue \u2013 a textbook compromise. Because both sides retreated from their respective maximal positions, their accounts of what, precisely, was agreed upon diverge. This is clearly also driven by domestic political considerations.<\/p>\n
The Greek side emphasizes that Berlin has abandoned its insistence on returning the secondary migrants to Greece. Berlin, in turn \u2013 and with it much of the German media \u2013 highlights that Athens has agreed to take back secondary migrants from Germany. The tabloid Bild speaks of a \u201chammer deal\u201d and quotes the interior minister it celebrates as saying: \u201cWe have agreed with Greece and Italy that they will take back migrants who entered the EU through their countries.\u201d<\/p>\n
So which is it? There is no contradiction between the two versions \u2013 neither is untrue, but each withholds part of the truth. The Greek migration minister is correct in noting that Germany has in fact dropped its demand to return the roughly 100,000 migrants accumulated since 2020 who, under the Dublin rules, should formally fall under Greece\u2019s responsibility. For Berlin, this is undoubtedly a major concession \u2013 and it is therefore hardly surprising that this element of the deal is being played down in German public communication, if not quietly set aside altogether. Marian Wendt, director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Athens and closely familiar with the inner workings of German-Greek relations<\/a>, speaks of a \u201cbreakthrough, because Germany is, for the first time, explicitly acknowledging the enormous burdens Greece has borne in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n Kassem Abo Zeed holds up a photograph with his wife, Ezra, who is missing after a fishing boat carrying migrants sank off southern Greece, in the southern port city of Kalamata, Thursday, June 15, 2023. Abo Zeed traveled from Hamburg, Germany, to try and find his wife and her missing brother, Abdullah Aoun. (AP Photo\/Thanassis Stavrakis)<\/p>\n Nor, however, did Minister Dobrindt leave the negotiations empty-handed. While he will not be able to send any of the 100,000 secondary refugees back to Greece \u2013 a pledge he has apparently made to the Greek side \u2013 Athens has, in return, committed itself to taking back, starting in mid-2026, all refugees who in the future reach Germany via Greece.<\/p>\n Minister Plevris is evidently banking on the expectation that his in some respects radical policy of deterrence will begin to show results and that irregular migration to Greece will decline significantly \u2013 thereby allowing the issue of secondary movements to diminish, at least in part, on its own. Perhaps, in cooperation with Berlin, Athens will also succeed by then in removing some unwanted migrants via deportation centers outside the European Union. Whether that calculation will hold is something the coming months will reveal.<\/p>\n Only a few days ago, at the conclusion of his visit to Germany, Greek Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis declared that relations between Berlin and Athens had never been better than they are today. With regard to the long-contested migration issue, that assessment \u2013 at least for the moment \u2013 appears difficult to dispute.<\/p>\n Dr. Ronald Meinardus is a senior research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hardly any political issue is as charged as migration policy. Across Europe \u2013 and beyond \u2013 xenophobic forces…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,1824,193526,5805,6657,193527],"class_list":{"0":"post-622464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-greek-german-relations","12":"tag-migrants","13":"tag-migration","14":"tag-migration-crisis"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115690459254573603","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622464","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=622464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AP23166444233340-1024x683.jpg\")
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