How migration is impacting European politics

Across Europe, but not exclusively Europe, anti-migrant politicians and parties continue to make great strides electorally. The recent German elections, saw the far Right AfD, Alternative for Deutschland, do particularly well – and forcing those historic adversaries, the Christian and Social democrats into a ‘grand coalition’. Less charitable commentators have called it a marriage of extreme inconvenience, a hold-out against what they see as the inevitable next time around. 

In Britain, the populist anti-migrant party, ReformUK, led by veteran Euro sceptic politician, Nigel Farage, has just pulled off the seemingly unthinkable, beating the governing Labour Party in one of its safest parliamentary seats in a by-election. Free movement, mass immigration and a seeming inability to stem the flow of illegal migrants across Europe’s borders and across the Channel has become the issue where many disgruntled voters merge alltheir wider concerns about unemployment, low wages, failing welfare and health systems and seemingly endless involvement in foreign wars. And if the political establishment in many of these countries hoped that the Trump effect might have dampened the appeal of the far Right, so far, they are proving to be mistaken. Voters are distinguishing between Trump who, overall, they are fearful of, with their own domestic varieties on offer. This was not the case in the recent Canadian elections where the clearly anti Trump, Mark Carney won convincingly, but then other than Denmark, no other European country is experiencing direct territorial claims from Donald Trump.

The anti-migrant, anti-immigrant wave is feeding its way through to the European Commission where a new set of new guidelines published by the European Union designed, says the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen at ‘streamlining asylum applications’ to the bloc has been released. The guidelines re-designate a whole series of countries now deemed to be ‘safe’ by the EU, including Tunisia and Egypt. This will enable EU member states to take a much tougher line with asylum claims from such countries. The designation of Egypt as ‘safe’ has sounded alarm bells. And the re-designation comes on top of an $8.42bn aid package handed by the EU to Egypt in March 2024 as part of moves to substantially reduce further migration from North Africa into Europe. At the time, this move was criticised by rights groups for not attaching conditions or demands for reform.

In a media release the European Commission said the new EU list would complement member countries' national lists of safe countries and "support a more uniform application of the concept, which allows Member States to process asylum claims of nationals from countries on the list in an accelerated procedure, on the basis that their claims are unlikely to be successful". The Commission has said that the guidelines still require the support of the European Parliament, but to many this looks like a fait accomplis.

The EU statement simply confirms that this move is not so much about ‘streamlining procedures’ but making it much more difficult for asylum seekers to be judged as such especially if their country has been designated ‘safe’. Human rights groups point to the still parlous position in Syria, and of the growing repression in countries such as Turkey and Tunisia. The question for Ursula Von Der Leyen and the EU Commissioners are two-fold; what actually constitutes being ‘safe’ and what is so difficult in being able to distinguish between economic migrants and asylum seekers? 

*Mark Seddon is a former Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Ban ki moon & former Adviser to the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly