In comments made before a speech to the European parliament last week, Viktor Orbán offered a predictably dismissive assessment of existing Brussels policy on irregular migration and asylum. “If we cannot agree that those who want to enter the EU must stop at the European border and apply outside our borders, we will never be able to stop migration,” suggested Hungary’s prime minister. “The only migrant who does not stay is the one who does not enter the EU.”
Draconian takes such as this, at odds with international law, used to make Mr Orbán a Trumpian outlier in European politics. Only last month, Brussels took steps to recover €200m in EU funds from Hungary, having fined Budapest for ignoring its asylum laws. But times are rapidly changing. A newly agreed migration pact, eight years in the making and establishing a fairer quota system for member states, already looks out of date.
Instead, an EU Council meeting this week looks set to confirm that the Orbánisation of European migration policy is well under way. The recent success of the anti-immigration far right across Europe has panicked the political mainstream into apeing the approach of Mr Orbán and his Italian ally, Giorgia Meloni. Before the summit, 15 EU countries, including Germany and France, produced a diplomatic text calling for a “paradigm shift” in asylum and migration policy. Ominously, the signatories seek a diminished role for the European court of justice in hearing appeals against deportation decisions.
In parallel, Mr Orbán’s notion of fixed migrant camps outside the EU’s external borders is becoming increasingly popular with other member states. Euphemistically described as “return hubs” or “hotspots”, these would amount to mass holding pens in third countries, created to ensure that people escaping war, persecution and the effects of the climate emergency could be kept out of sight and out of mind.
Existing precedents for such “outsourcing” are hardly reassuring. An agreement between Ms Meloni and Albania has only just become operational. But the European Commission and Italy are already paying Tunisia to contain and return irregular migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean. A growing body of evidence has documented serious human rights abuses there, and reprisals against NGO workers attempting to support refugees.
The challenge of migration in a more mobile and increasingly unstable world is daunting. But as the centre-left Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, admirably demonstrated in a recent speech, it is still possible for political leaders to make both a pragmatic and a compassionate case in relation to it. Recalling the desperate journeys of Spaniards fleeing the Franco dictatorship, Mr Sánchez called on modern Spain to strive to be “that welcoming, tolerant, supportive society that they would have liked to find”.
Sadly, it is Mr Sánchez, not Mr Orbán, who now seems to be the outlier. At pace, the EU is drifting towards the most ruthless “Fortress Europe” approach in its modern history. As recently as 2018, the idea of externally located return centres was deemed by the European Commission to be incompatible with the EU’s values. But a very different consensus is emerging.
This week’s European Council meeting will be a major test of that new balance of power. Through a quirk of the presidency rota, Hungary will be in the chair. Merely a coincidence, but one that nevertheless feels like a depressing sign of the times.
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