EU leaders look at ways to tighten their borders in the wake of a far-right surge

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders on Thursday lauded a groundswell of support for tightening their borders and making the bloc a more hostile destination for migrants and asylum seekers following a recent surge in support for the extreme right, which has fomented opposition to foreigners.

They also backed Poland's moves to rein in migration after Warsaw said it wants to temporarily suspend the right to asylum because it feels Russia and Belarus are seeking to create chaos by pushing migrants across the EU border as a form of hybrid warfare targeting the 27-nation bloc.

At the end of a summit dominated by migration issues, EU leaders were already fostering plans to speed up initiatives to get migrants not eligible to stay in the EU out of the bloc and process asylum applications far outside their borders, seeking to buttress a reputation as a “Fortress Europe.”

Echoing comments from many quarters, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that “Things are changing in the European Union. Now the majority of leaders are saying the same: that we cannot continue. The numbers are too high. We have to return those who should not be protected in Europe.”

“We see that there is a different mood in Europe,” said Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, who heads a government dominated by the party of far-right firebrand Geert Wilders.

The tenor of the debate is a far cry from 2015, less than a decade ago, when the EU was faced with a migration crisis. Well over a million migrants and refugees sought help then, mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU's dominant national leader at the time, famously said, “We can manage that.”

Now, EU leaders want to manage and seal off their borders ever more tightly, embracing initiatives that would have looked unacceptable only a few years ago.

In recent weeks, as well as Poland said it wants to temporarily suspend the right to asylum, Italy opened two centers to process asylum seekers outside its borders in Albania, and Germany has reinstated border controls — all those measures going in the same direction.

Poland's measure though was an outlier in the debate and fueled by Russia's war against EU ally Ukraine.

“It is clearly migration manipulation to destabilize a country,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, a sentiment that got near unanimous backing.

“These are hybrid attacks by state actors, and therefore Poland and other member states need to be able to protect our union from these hybrid attacks. Same goes for Finland and the Baltic states,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Overall though, member states were bent on speeding up plans that lay out rules for the 27 member countries to handle people trying to enter without authorization, from how to screen them to establish whether they qualify for protection to deporting them if they’re not allowed to stay. The plans also set out a mechanism for burden-sharing, which has been rejected by Hungary and Poland.

But with the extreme right surging in the EU parliamentary elections in June and in other polls in Germany and Austria since, migration remains a trigger button for leaders.

While some 3.5 million migrants arrived legally in Europe in 2023, about 1 million others were on EU territory without permission.

Politically, populist and hard right parties have had success in pushing for tougher migration rules, and after wins in German regional elections, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is feeling the heat too.

“One thing is clear: Irregular migration needs to be reduced," he said at the end of the summit, but warned that the bloc needed to remain open for skilled migration to counter an aging population and help boost a sputtering economy.

“It is true that not just everyone can come and stay and that we can choose who comes,” Scholz said.

Von der Leyen had called for “innovative” projects, like Italy's outsourcing of asylum applications to Albania.

Schoof's Dutch government is looking at Uganda to set up the outsourcing. “These are innovative solutions that should in principle interest our colleagues here,” he said.

But EU nations have for years been deeply divided over how to deal with migrants arriving irregularly in the bloc and how to share the effort to deal with them, making it unlikely that any decisive joint action will be many months in the making.

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Corder reported from The Hague. Associated Press writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

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