RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘The state must regain 100 per cent of the control over who enters and leaves.’ What makes this statement so remarkable is who said it. Because it wasn’t a Eurosceptic populist making this case for a nation’s sovereignty over its own borders. It was Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk.

Yes, that Donald Tusk. The died-in-the-wool Europhile and former president of the European Council. A man so enamoured by the EU’s borderless dream he damned those concerned about the 2015 migrant crisis as racists and xenophobes. A politician so committed to the passport-free promise of the EU’s Schengen area, that he has relentlessly defended it, even as it has visibly creaked under the migratory waves of the past decade.

And yet here he is now, issuing a call to take back control of Poland’s borders, pledging to wage a ‘merciless’ fight against illegal immigration. He now sounds more like the Brexiteers he once said deserved ‘a special place in hell’.

The ostensible prompt for Tusk’s rather surprising conversion to the merits of national sovereignty lies on Poland’s and the EU’s border with Belarus. Over the past three years, thousands of migrants from Belarus, the Middle East and Africa have crossed into Poland from the east and sought to claim asylum. Tusk claims that this influx is part of a ‘hybrid war’ being waged by Russia via its Belarusian ally / proxy. Belarusian border guards are said to be waving migrants through as part of an attempt to destabilise Poland and the EU. So in response, Tusk has announced ‘the temporary suspension of the right to asylum on [Polish] territory’.

Yet while Tusk has been invoking the spectre of Russian foul play to justify pulling up Poland’s drawbridge, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that he’s more worried about threats closer to home. His pro-EU, centrist Civic Platform coalition may have narrowly won Poland’s parliamentary elections last year. But it has been struggling ever since, and is currently level-pegging with the Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party (PiS) in the polls. Tusk knows only too well that the EU’s inability to address public concerns about high levels of immigration and a broken asylum system is fuelling the revival of his domestic opponents. Tusk’s suspension of the right to asylum whiffs of an attempt to neutralise the populist appeal of his rivals.

Tusk is far from alone among struggling Europhile politicians in suddenly discovering the importance of national borders. Last month, Germany’s colossally unpopular chancellor, Olaf Scholz, introduced border controls on all of Germany’s land borders. This was partially in response to an Islamist terror attack in Solingen, west Germany, but mostly in response to mounting pressure from voters and populist parties.

Of course, the populist opposition to migration hasn’t come from nowhere. It is clear that EU member states really have lost control of their borders. All are bound to allow freedom of movement to EU citizens, for one thing. And when illegal migrants make it into the EU, there is little to prevent them drifting from country to country. Arguably, it is this lack of sovereign control that has pushed the likes of Tusk to take such a rash, heavy-handed decision as to suspend asylum entirely.

Strikingly, Brussels itself seems to have turned on a dime on migration. Last week, after a typically behind-closed-doors meeting, the European Commission rallied behind Tusk. In a statement backed by the EU’s 27 members, Brussels claimed that Russia and Belarus are attempting to ‘abuse our values’ and ‘undermine our democracies’, and that ‘exceptional situations require appropriate measures’.

‘Appropriate measures’ is one way to describe the suspension of the right to asylum and a call for national border control by an EU member state. Even by the standards of Brussels, which has frequently turned a blind eye to the breaking of EU rules by its favoured sons and most powerful member states, all while threatening and condemning other supposedly wayward member states, this is quite the about turn. Alongside the introduction of border controls in Germany, Poland’s talk of protecting its territorial integrity threatens to make a mockery of the EU’s commitment to freedom of movement. Imagine if one of the EU’s malcontents, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, had just done what Tusk has – there would have been talk of financial punishments and even threats of expulsion.

These attempts to cack-handedly halt certain forms of migration are a sign of the crisis the EU now finds itself in. Eurocrats and pro-EU leaders are so desperate to deflate the populist revolt, they are willing to junk some of the fundamental commitments the EU was founded upon, just so they can keep the show on the road. The Brussels regime is struggling to hold itself together.