Subscribe
The migrant crisis in Spain puts the newly awoken European centre-right to the test. Will they produce a serious response to the Spanish socialist government’s undermining of the European border integrity?
The European People’s Parties group in the European Parliament, once upon a time the engineers of the immensely liberal Europe-wide immigration policy, have in a bid to save their political power aligned themselves closer to the nationalist parties of the parliament and enacted landmark decisions to launch deportations and secure the borders. For the nationalists and conservatives, Ursula von der Leyen’s tenure as President of the European Commission has had very few legitimising factors, and it is therefore understandable that she too has been on board with the stricter policies.
It required a lot to drag the establishment centre-right of Europe into this position, however. For decades, multiple countries of Western Europe have experienced staggering social changes as a result of mass immigration, both legal and illegal. This has even destabilised the voting patterns in these countries; nationalists have grown at the expense of the traditional right wing parties, but even then, an openness to respond to the worries of conservative voters was nowhere to be seen.
This changed somewhat with the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016. When the consequences of uncontrolled immigration became too overbearing, many of these centre-right parties started to shift their rhetoric. It took an additional amount of years for them to put their words into action, however. These are the fruits that were harvested when the new migration deal was struck earlier this year, which facilitated return hubs in specific countries outside of Europe for illegal migrants, including legal migrants who have lost their permits through criminality or other abuse.
The constituent European People’s Parties, as well as like-minded centre-right parties, have in various ways also tried to compete with the nationalists in their respective countries. More often than not however, these efforts appear half-hearted. This is no surprise considering they represent a political tradition that has to carry its complicity in the 21st-century European migration disaster as its cross. Many politicians who continue to make up and shape the established European centre-right still at heart believe in open borders and multiculturalism.
Will they let Sanchez get away?
The Spanish government, led by Pedro Sanchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, has had the eyes of Europe on them for a long time, and seriously broke the political trend of stricter migration policies with the amnesty of half a million illegal migrants in February of this year. Sanchez was quickly villainised by nationalists, but celebrated by the European left. The amnesty sent signals across the world that Spain, and by extension Europe, still may reward illegal migration with permanent work and residence permits.
To illustrate the gravity of Sanchez’s decision, a comparison with the reigning European champions of mass immigration of the 2010s, Sweden, is apt.
In 2018, the Swedish Social Democratic government of Stefan Löfven issued a conditional amnesty to up to 11 000 Afghan migrants who had arrived illegally during the migrant crisis. If they finished Swedish secondary education, gymnasium, they would be rewarded with legal status. This policy would has to this day continued to serve as an example of leftist recklessness by critics on the right, mainly the Sweden Democrats, as it signalled to other willing illegal migrants around the world that the political establishment would ‘give them a chance’. The amnesty has further been used as an example of how a left-controlled parliament can draft and enact immensely liberal legislation seemingly on a whim, while the right has to grind away for months or years just to get more controls or stricter requirements into law. The Afghan amnesty was nothing short of a trauma for Swedish nationalists.
Sweden has approximately ten million inhabitants. The amnesty, which left deep marks in Swedish politics, concerned one permille of the entire population.
Spain, with its nearly 50 million inhabitants, was forced by its government to accept an amnesty of one percent of its entire population. According to the government’s original intent, almost one million people could eventually be encompassed by the amnesty, bringing that number up to two percent. The scale of this long-term catastrophe cannot be understated. The socialists’ amnesty hardly even discriminated; the signal to the rest of the world is almost unparallelled by any other single pen stroke during 2015.
It is not hard to connect the amnesty and the general pro-migration sentiment of Pedro Sanchez government to the ‘invasion’ of the Spanish African enclave of Ceuta in late July. Up to 60 000 migrants, mostly of Moroccan background, bypassed the border fences, often by swimming around them. The Spanish response was seemingly non-decisive. Rather than calling out the criminal violation and signalling that illegal immigration to the European Union is unacceptable, Pedro Sanchez seems to have been busier brushing off criticism from other European politicians.
The governments of Denmark and Italy, who are often leading the way on new EU initiatives on preventing illegal migration to Europe, again assumed leadership and openly called for the suspension of Spain from the Schengen zone of free movement. That two European prime ministers called for such action against another EU member state on such grounds is almost unprecedented, especially with migration issues being in the background. It is rare – and highly welcome – to see European leaders take the threat of illegal immigration so seriously. The Sanchez government in Madrid is causing not only Spain enormous damage, but the risk that its naivety regarding immigration will put the rest of Europe under harder pressure is endangering the entire continent.
Despite this obvious danger, there have been few formal voices who have so far demanded anything of Spain. Let us return to the problem of the centre-right not committing to solving Europe’s migration problem.
It is one thing to swallow your pride on a few occasions and let the nationalists have it their way in parliament on what, in all honesty, is a low-hanging fruit; that illegal migrants must be deported. It is another thing to in word and in action directly question another European government, when that government is run by your friends. Yes, the political establishment of Europe, encompassing most of the mainstream parties on the centre-left and the centre-right who have known each other and fraternised across the formal political boundaries for decades, likely have a sense of solidarity. To the average European centre-right politician, Pedro Sanchez socialist party is not a pariah. They are the ‘sensible’ and ‘respectable’ left-wing party in Spain, not some populist upstarts. These politicians have negotiated, shook hands, and laughed together with Sanchez’s predecessors.
This silent agreement of conduct that exists between the established parties (but rarely extends to parties that seriously challenge the decadence and faults of the European Union) is why serious action against Spain likely won’t be taken.
The problem with Pedro Sanchez’s government is larger than the 60,000 migrants who forced the Ceuta border. The amnesty in February should have raised alarm across European capitals, but did not. To the political establishment, perhaps a million illegal migrants receiving permanent residence and work status in Spain, and by extension in all of Europe, is a “domestic question” that is unsuitable for a foreign government to comment on? It is time that the politicians of Europe show that their embrace of deportations and a permanent stop to uncontrolled immigration into our home is not just a nimble political trend, but an actual conviction.