In one corner: Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president who slams the “short-sightedness of those who would like to see a Europe that is divided by anti-migrant walls.” In the other: Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary who has just finished building an anti-immigration fence on his country’s southern border with Serbia.
The two leaders will sit down behind closed doors Thursday on an issue that deeply divides them: Europe’s escalating migration crisis. From the highways of Austria to the shores of Greece to the main railway station in Budapest, thousands of migrants arriving each day are putting pressure on national governments and especially the European Union to find a way to cope with the influx.
The meeting follows days of sharp volleys between Budapest and Brussels. A top Orbán aide told a Hungarian parliament committee that the migration problem was due partly to “the leftist approach” of the Commission, after Juncker, in an article published last week by several European newspapers, wrote that countries had to do their part and “adopt the European measures and implement them.”
In a sharply worded op-ed published Thursday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Orbán again criticized EU politicians for failing to address public concerns about the refugee crisis. He also wrote that most of the refugees arriving in Hungary were Muslims, not Christians, and suggested it was “alarming that Europe’s Christian culture is barely in a position to uphold Europe’s own Christian values.”
Despite their differences on migration, Juncker and Orbán belong to the same political party group, the center-right European People’s Party, which holds the majority in the European Parliament and which includes also German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU.
The party recognizes it faces an internal clash and is trying to smooth out the differences. “We will do our best not to get divided among us,” said Antonio Tajani, a vice president of the European Parliament and senior figure in the EPP. “What is important is that everybody grasps how difficult the situation is.”
In Hungary, there is little question of that. By the end of May, 50,000 refugees and migrants had crossed the country’s borders, compared with 43,000 in all of 2014, local authorities said. More than 2,280 refugees crossed the border on Tuesday alone, the officials said.
Hungary’s fence, barring asylum seekers from entering via Serbia | CSABA SEGESVARI/AFP/Getty
Juncker is speeding up his efforts to propose a permanent solution to relocate asylum-seekers across the bloc, and aiming to present it ahead of a September 14 emergency meeting of justice and home affairs ministers. But this new proposal, whatever it turns out to include, will attempt to build on a migration agenda introduced in May by the Commission that has already met with opposition from many countries, especially in Eastern Europe.
Commission officials held three private sessions Wednesday where migration was at the top of the agenda. One option under consideration is a new temporary relocation mechanism for 120,000 refugees, including asylum seekers stuck in Hungary — an element that could soften the opposition of Eastern European countries, a person familiar with the talks said.
The meeting between Orbán and Juncker is described as routine by Commission officials, who deny it was called in response to the emergency situation. The two leaders will discuss how the EU can help Hungary beyond a contribution of €8 million in emergency funds it has already asked for to help it deal with the flux of refugees, a request that the Commission has fast-tracked. Migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos will also travel to Hungary next Monday.
Juncker hits back
On the eve of Juncker’s meeting with Orbán, the Commission struck back at the Hungarian claims that the EU is somehow responsible for the migration crisis. The Commission president is working “day and night” to resolve the issue, a Commission spokesman told reporters Wednesday, refusing to elaborate on which country he was referring to. He urged them to read again the Commission proposal presented in May as a sign that the EU has been on top of the issue.
Meanwhile, the blame game has become borderless.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, in an interview Sunday with French radio Europe 1, said it was “scandalous” the way certain Eastern European countries have handled the current refugee crisis. Austria has attacked Hungary for its handling of the crisis and Hungary has attacked Germany for its decision to accept Syrian refugees who arrive via other countries, contradicting an EU rule that says they should remain in the first country they arrive.
The Commission Agenda launched in May has yet to be voted by the European Parliament and still must be finalized by the Council. It called for the relocation of 40,000 refugees from Italy and Greece and the resettlement of 20,000 from outside the EU. The 40,000 goal has not been reached yet mainly because of the opposition of Eastern European countries, backed by Spain.
Hungary, for example, has agreed to accept none of those refugees.
Despite the setbacks, the Commission is pushing ahead, hoping to move beyond the temporary measures in the May proposals with a permanent mechanism. The new proposals were meant to be announced by the end of the year but are now being pushed more quickly in response to recent events, Commission officials said. The September 14 meeting of justice and interior ministers will come just five days after Juncker addresses the issue in his State of the Union address to the European Parliament.
The challenge will be finding European solidarity on the issue.
Opponents dig in
In an interview Tuesday with Reuters, Avramopoulos sounded upbeat. “Some countries that were a bit reluctant … have changed their mind because now they realize that this problem is not the problem of other countries but theirs as well,” he said.
Yet in many Eastern European countries remain resistant.
Slovakia, with a population of 5 million, is taking only 200 asylum seekers, and Prime Minister Robert Fico has made it clear that all of them should be Christians.
Fico estimated that 95 percent of those moving to Europe are economic migrants, not refugees fleeing war. “We won’t assist in this folly with arms opened wide with the notion that we’ll accept them all regardless of whether they’re economic migrants or not,” he said recently, calling on countries along the EU’s external frontiers to “carry out their duties properly and not open the borders to everybody.”
Poland has been similarly lukewarm about taking large numbers of refugees, and has also expressed a preference for taking Christian over Muslims.
Jerzy Polaczek, an MP from the right-wing Law and Justice party, wrote recently that the potential assimilation of Muslims into overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Poland “would be much more difficult — if at all possible — than Christians.”
Migrants in Budapest making a plea to travel to Germany | Getty
Speaking last month to POLITICO, Andrzej Duda, Poland’s new president, made it clear that he felt his country was too poor to accept many refugees, and would be more open to receiving ethnic Poles living in the former Soviet Union.
Ewa Kopacz, the Polish prime minister, is coming under strong pressure from Germany, Poland’s leading EU partner, to shift her position. The country has agreed to take 2,200 refugees, but Kopacz is now saying that in light of growing numbers of migrants she said there may have to be a reassessment of how many people are accepted, which Poland will respond to “in the spirit of responsibility and the assessment of our capabilities.”
The Polish government is also operating in a difficult political environment. Kopacz and her Civic Platform party are trailing Law and Justice ahead of this fall’s parliamentary elections.
“We know that we have to show solidarity, but we have elections on Oct. 25,” said a Polish government official.
The Czech Republic is also dealing with growing numbers of migrants. Police, apparently unaware of the way their actions would be perceived outside the country, this week detained more than 200 migrants trying to travel to Germany, marking their arms with ID numbers.
“We want measures that will lead to the stopping of migration waves,” Milan Chovanec, the Czech interior minister, said, according to the CTK news agency.
“The issue of migration is contentious domestically; the fact is people are genuinely scared. This does not only apply on the to the Czech Republic but all the Central European countries,” said a senior Czech government official. “The public wants the government to take a tough line, but the EU is all about solidarity. This is a difficult balancing act.”
Leaders from the Visegrad Group of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are meeting Friday to hammer out a common position on migration.
It’s unclear whether the meeting between Juncker and Orbán the day before will have made their job any easier.