Hardliners calling the shots in Europe migrant boat crisis

Italy’s refusal to admit the migrant-packed Aquarius ship met little protest from other EU countries apart from France, which analysts see as a sign of how hardliners are now shaping solutions to the migration crisis.French President Emmanuel Macron denounced Rome’s “irresponsibility” but failed to sway a European Union now bent on protecting its external borders after years of division over the worst such crisis since World War II.The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm in Brussels, limited itself to appeals for solidarity among the 28 member-states and for humanity toward migrants adrift at sea.An analyst said Rome’s refusal to admit the Aquarius marks a “radical” departure from European attitudes five years ago.He recalled that in 2013, faced with a lack of response from its neighbours, Italy took the opposite approach by launching the humanitarian maritime mission Mare Nostrum.The Aquarius saga shows the “victory of more restrictive, harder positions” that favour locking EU borders.The EU’s former communist countries in the east, like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, have embraced such positions for years.They have either completely opposed or resisted quotas that EU member-countries endorsed in 2015, at the peak of the migration crisis, when more than 1.26mn people applied for asylum in the bloc.But several other EU countries have since joined them.The EU was early on “very divided between the east and west, but the situation has changed,” Elena Sanchez Montijano at the Spanish think tank CIDOB said.Sanchez pointed to the election successes of anti-migrant arguments in several countries, including in Italy and Austria where the extreme right has gained power.She added that in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had opened the country up to refugees, today faces “a serious internal crisis” where her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer takes a hard line against her.It is precisely with Seehofer and his Italian counterpart that Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says he wants to build an “axis of the willing” against illegal migration.Austria, which next month assumes the EU’s six-month rotating presidency, said it will focus on pursuing all steps needed to protect the bloc’s external borders.Vienna also confirmed it is working with countries like Denmark on a plan that had been considered unlikely: building camps (dubbed “reception centres”) outside the EU to separate genuine asylum seekers from economic migrants.Under the current rules, the countries of first arrival are required to process asylum requests.Critics say that puts an unfair burden on Greece and Italy.But just two weeks before the self-imposed deadline of the June 28-29 EU summit in Brussels, EU countries remain deadlocked on how to relocate asylum seekers in the event of a new crisis.Days before the Aquarius saga, Belgium’s hardline Migration Minister Theo Francken said he was “convinced that if all the doors were closed, all the countries would agree to show more solidarity.” Spain’s new Socialist government has since agreed to allow the Aquarius and its 629 migrants to dock in Valencia.