Europe’s Right-Turn on Migration is More of the Same
Franz Pokorny
A motion oft raised in the all-hours Oxford Union that is twitter holds that Europe has fallen. Its disconsolate sponsors raise the sheer size of the allochthonous populations its clueless leaders have settled within its borders, buttressing their reports by video evidence of their misbehaviour. Its opponents smugly point to Europe’s superior demographics compared to the Anglophone world, the share of its right-wing parties in the continent’s parliaments, and the built-in restraints on the arbitrary whims of activist judges that the civil law provides. Decades of 68er error, right-wing europhiles contend, will be resolved through sensible, pragmatic politics by sober Dutch bankers and the impressive graduates of those grandes écoles, loosening — as Swedish and Dutch centre-rightists have already done — the cordon sanitaire and working across the aisle to dam migrant inflows and deport violent criminals.
In the wake of that tragic morning when the insane woke mist descended on Merkel, Europe’s conservatives scrambled to save face. An informal compromise congealed along the lines of the German security chiefs’ October 2015 letter in Welt am Sonntag, whereby Merkel’s opening of the floodgates was accepted as a fait accompli at the price that such a thing would never again be allowed to happen. Articles about Germany’s „shift to the right“ on migration have been appearing in the Anglophone press since 2015. Since there has been only slow turnover in the higher echelons of Berlin and the Berlaymont since that fateful year, it is worth revisiting the legacy of the past decade to understand what to make of these recent developments towards which the bony fingers of Old Queen Street now gesture in giddy tremulation.
Though now almost forgotten, Europe’s Thermidorian politics of migration detente between 2015 and 2019 largely succeeded in its aim of „getting the numbers down“. Border controls were almost immediately reintroduced between Germany and Austria and at Austria’s southeastern borders in November 2015, and maintained until a much stricter regimen was introduced during the lockdowns. A dodgy deal was inked with Turkey in March 2016 whereunder the Turks agreed to retake rejected asylum claimants on a „one in, one out“ basis in exchange for a €6 billion bung, ostensibly to provide for the needs of existing Syrian migrants in Turkey and tighten up the country’s own border defences. In Germany and Austria, the epicentre of the migrant crisis, asylum claims and net migration were gradually reduced between 2016 and 2020 to pre-2015 levels (the Merkelwave, incidentally, left comparatively little mark on France, Spain, and Italy, whose demographic kettles have been boiling at a different pace). While these numbers were still, by any Reasonable judgement, too high, Europe’s easily hoodwinked publics were evidently prepared to swallow Ms. Merkel’s medicine.
The political dividends of this „new hardness“ were obvious. The AfD — polling at 17% in late 2018 and briefly supplanting the Social Democrats as Germany’s second largest party — was reduced to low double-digit figures by the spring of 2019, and even posted losses at the 2021 election. Although it was the Ibiza scandal that brought down the ÖVP/FPÖ coalition, this return to business as usual could occur only because Kurz had successfully wrested the initiative from the populists on migration. It was climate change, not migration, that was in the centre at the 2019 European Parliament election campaign, and the „far right’s“ modest gains (the previous ballot had been held in 2014, when demographics were stabler and the migration issue barely registered) suggested that the populist wave had crested, giving hope to merkeloid mountebanks that the chancellor’s moral vision would be vindicated in the long run.
Reader, these were dark days! The AfD’s ongoing internal controversies over the „optics“ of discussing remigration elucidate the extent to which the 2015 intake was considered settled business within the political bubble until very, very recently. The British meme about „taking back control“ being tantamount to „burying the migration issue“ has its ugly sister on the continent, with the EU’s migration deal with Turkey and Kurz’s grand rhetoric about „closing the Balkan route“ substituting for a straightforward campaign of deportations and stripping of migrants’ privileges (Germany even used the tumult of the 2015 influx to permanently increase residence permit issuance to around a half million per year, perhaps hoping that in the great swill of brown nobody would notice a few extra faces). It is only the unusually savage barbarism of the (mostly) Afghans brought in during the lockdown wave, the rampages of the Senegalese and their cousins the Gambians through the SPD’s working-class redoubts, and the wide dispersion of these groups throughout the country’s greenest retirement pastures that has tipped public sentiment towards more comprehensive action. Whereas under Merkel it still stood free to the middle class to slip away from the madding MENA crowd and dream the dream of the Old Bundesrepublik in their leafy suburbs, the superstructure of human rights moralising and similar ideologies of flat-out denial that wafted up from this unfruitful basis is now crumbling west of the Elbe.
A frequent error made by Anglophone observers of continental politics is to read hardline proclamations by austere, grey-templed Barnier types as an indication that the adults are finally back in the room and ready to sort things out. While such rhetoric is rightly be seen for the absurdity it is when it floats into the world on the booze-stained breath of a Starmer or a Jenrick, there is a mistaken belief that Europe’s politicians are made of sterner fibre. Take Olaf Scholz’s promise to „deport in a grand style“, which only last year graced the cover of Spiegel alongside a stern-looking photo of the chancellor, his face half in shadow. Although the Scholz regime managed to increase the total number of deportations in 2024 by 20% on the previous year, 33,717 out of 53,801 planned expulsions were unsuccesful. With 178.500 people with outstanding deportation orders still in the country (a figure sharply reduced from the previous year largely through the regime’s reforms to Germany’s residency laws), even a 100% success rate would only be a drop in the bucket of reducing that subset of existing resident aliens who arrived illegally.