A rising number of EU member states are moving closer to the migration stance of the Visegrád Four countries, said security policy expert György Nógrádi on Hungarian national television channel M1 on Wednesday.
Nógrádi said that at the same time that more countries embrace migration policies from countries like Hungary, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also approaching the end of her tenure and will not have enough time left to implement her liberal migration policies or force them on the EU as a whole.
He said the Malta agreement on the temporary handling of migrants reached by the three EU member states of France, Germany and Italy in September only found a handful of other followers. While Germany said that it was willing to take in political refugees, in reality about 90% of illegal migrants arriving in EU countries are economic migrants, which also indicates the failure of Merkel’s migration policies.
The impact of Merkle’s decision in 2015 to accept over 1 million refugees has had continued consequences across Europe and galvanized anti-migration political parties to push back against her open border policies. Many of these parties are working hard to ensure a similar wave does not occur, but thousands of refugees are still entering Europe every year, with warnings that the next refugee wave will “break Europe’s back.”
Nógrádi said that the new head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was not “Merkel’s puppet” and he had reasonable hopes that the EU’s new migration strategy that von der Leyer promised to draft by next summer will be both human and offer adequate protection for European borders.
A recent report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) concluded that the EU should step up action on asylum, relocation and return of migrants to better meet the objectives of its support.
The report said that existing relocation schemes did not reach their targets and only partially achieved their main objective of alleviating pressure on Greece and Italy.
“Despite increased asylum-processing capacities in both countries, long handling times and bottlenecks persist, while returns of irregular migrants remain low and problematic across the EU,” the report conluded.
Nógrádi commented that the relocation mechanism only exists on paper and Greece is incapable of defending its own borders.
Title image: Illegal migrants on the Serbian-Hungarian border in 2015 (MTI)
