The European Council Summit: Migration, Migration, Migration

The letter followed an October 7 document signed by 17 European governments, including the Czech and Slovak ones, calling for a “paradigm shift” in the bloc’s migration policy, a strengthening of the external borders, and a radical toughening of the return procedures for asylum seekers who’ve had their applications turned down.

Later that week, on October 12, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, seen as a centrist leading a liberal-democratic government, announced the suspension of asylum rights due to pressure on its border with Belarus, which is being caused by the regime of President Aleksandr Lukashenko bussing tens of thousands of migrants to its borders with the EU and herding them across to foment a crisis.

The Hungarian government of Viktor Orban has traditionally taken a tough line on immigration and has been loudly proclaiming recently that its dire predictions about the viability of the EU’s passport-free zone and migration policies are coming true.

“Since 2015, I have been called either an idiot or an evil person for my stance on migration. But, at the end of the day, everyone will agree with me,” Orban told reporters at his international press conference in Strasbourg last week.

Orban has been campaigning for a “fortress Europe” for almost a decade and built a 175-kilometre-long fence on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia in the wake of the 2015 migration crisis, when the continent saw a huge influx of refugees and migrants into Europe, namely from the Middle East.

Orban has been at loggerheads with both the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) over the breaching of European laws on asylum by his nationalist-populist government, in the process losing several cases at the ECJ for inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and migrants.

The right to asylum is considered a fundamental human right in international law, originating in the 1951 Convention on Refugees. It is also enshrined in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Yet Orban’s isolation within the EU over the issue has been lessening of late as he gains new allies in the region and beyond.

Newest to his club is Austria, where the anti-immigration far-right FPÖ party won the September 29 general election, although it might not get the chance to govern.

A year earlier, the populist Robert Fico regained power in Slovakia after winning the election there and forming a coalition with two other parties, one of them the extreme-right Slovak National Party.

In Czechia, the populist ANO party of former premier Andrej Babis looks poised to retake power in next year’s general election, possibly in league with the far-right SPD.

Further west, in 2023, Orban’s longtime friend Geert Wilders, campaigning on a tough anti-immigration line, won the election in the Netherlands. And this year, the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen came first in the European Parliament elections in France.

In recent regional elections, Germany was shocked by the far-right AfD’s outright success in Thuringia, and its second place in Saxony and in Brandenburg. The election results have put pressure on the ruling coalition in Berlin, which swiftly reinstated temporary controls at its external borders to appease the right.

“Major European countries are hardening their stance towards migration. Even the last two bastions of liberal policies, like Sweden and Germany, are introducing controls,” Viktor Marsai, director of Hungary’s Migration Research Institute, a conservative think tank which is part of the government-close Mathias Corvinus College (MCC), tells BIRN.

Andras Lederer from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog, agrees governments elected over the past year across Europe are those that “favour restrictions on migration and asylum policies”.