Failing to tackle immigration isn’t only a problem for Rishi Sunak. The European Union is also struggling to deal with the issue. Now, Brussels has devised a plan for dividing up among its member states the would-be migrants at the EU’s doors. But Poland and Hungary are not happy.
The EU used qualified majority voting, which is intended to allow a sufficient number of its larger countries to override a small number of holdouts, to push the idea through. Essentially each member state will be given a quota and could then be charged €20,000 (£17,000) per head for falling short. This is legally fairly watertight, since, under EU law, immigration is generally a matter for majority voting. Added to this, if push comes to shove, the European Court might well support the Brussels’ view, especially where that calls for the centralisation of powers. But politically it could well create an enormous Euro-headache, as events in Poland made clear yesterday.
The proposal for a Polish referendum puts the EU embarrassingly on the spot
Poland and Hungary are the two holdout states whose objections were swept aside. (Four other countries including three on the front line – Bulgaria, Malta and Slovakia – discreetly abstained. No doubt they were equally unhappy but hoping to placate Brussels when it came to arguing about the numbers by avoiding an outright no.)
Both Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland and and Viktor Orbán of Hungary made their feelings quite clear at an immigration summit last week where they deliberately blocked the adoption of a common EU position on immigration. Over the weekend, Poland threw down the gauntlet, stating that it was immediately introducing legislation to put the refugee issue to a referendum timed to coincide with the elections in the autumn.
This move, making good on an open threat issued earlier by Warsaw, is well-timed to disconcert Brussels. When something similar happened in Hungary in 2016, culminating in an overwhelming vote against a previous EU migrant quota plan, Brussels’s face was only saved because enough people abstained to make the vote technically invalid under Hungarian law. But there is no guarantee this will happen again, particularly since the Polish people will be voting anyway on referendum day, and attitudes in eastern Europe on immigration have, if anything, hardened.
Western European leaders are clearly rattled. Luxembourg’s premier Xavier Bettel has levelled accusations of the ultimate Euro-sin of refusing to respect the EU treaties; EU council president Charles Michel has darkly spoken of the ‘toxicity’ of referring to migration ahead of national elections.
As for Brussels, it has been reduced to arguing that the scheme is technically voluntary: states, it says, have a choice to pay rather than allow actual immigration, and that in any case Poland could expect credit for its acceptance of Ukrainian refugees. Poland unsurprisingly is unimpressed by such fudging, seeing the payment of €20,000 per refugee not taken as a fine under another name. They have pointed out that, in the last resort, the legal power to determine how many each member state had to settle lay with Brussels.
The difficulty faced by Brussels is that Poland has a point. Whatever the legalities, politically, at least, Warsaw is on strong ground. It has the sympathy of Hungary and to a lesser extent of other states at the sharp end. Italy, another country affected by undocumented arrivals, only supported Brussels after some arm-twisting.
Poland can also argue with some conviction that, EU free movement aside, control of third-country immigration is a fundamental aspect of nationhood. The present EU plan may envisage limited numbers of migrants to be distributed among individual member states, but potentially the EU is asking for a fairly open-ended commitment to admit numbers dictated by Brussels.
The idea that Warsaw might be ordered by those outside its borders – and over whom it has little to no control – to take unspecified numbers with no veto understandably shocks the Polish government. This view is shared in Budapest, where on Sunday the urbane Zoltán Kovács, Hungarian state secretary for international relations and an ally of Morawiecki on migration matters, said that in practice the EU plan would mean the legal imposition on member states of ‘migrant ghettos’ in the form of permanent large camps inside their borders.
More to the point, the proposal for a Polish referendum puts the EU embarrassingly on the spot. Suppose Poles do vote in fairly large numbers against the legal rules for refugees proposed by Brussels, and that the Polish government duly follows this vote with a point-blank refusal to obey them. What would the Commission do?
It could backtrack and work out some kind of untidy compromise with Poland, and probably with Hungary too. But it knows quite well that conceding what would be seen as a de facto veto in this case would dangerously undermine its position in other areas; its long-standing efforts to cajole or coerce the nations of eastern Europe to toe the Brussels line, on matters ranging from appointment of judges to the environment and LGBT policy, would be jeopardised.
Alternatively, the EU could hold its ground. It could put the matter before the European court and insist on the supremacy of EU law over the results of mere national referendums, in the same way that it might demand that the wish of a Berlaymont bureaucrat potentially prevail over even a national constitution. But this would leave its democratic credentials even more tattered, and also stoke anti-European feeling in countries that still retain uncomfortable memories of Soviet bullying. Such a move could well be seen by many in eastern Europe – where people feel strongly about large-scale immigration and value their national identity more than most in the West – as showing that the EU was a soft touch on migration, prepared to overrule any unwillingness by member states to admit asylum seekers.
The EU will clearly be praying for Morawiecki to lose both election and referendum. But if he does not, the choice facing it will not be attractive. Whichever way it goes, it is hard to see the EU escaping a big dent to both its reputation and its authority.
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