(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Derk Jan Eppink: Niet het kabinet-Schoof zit in een Europees isolement, maar de dromers van GroenLinks-PvdA)
Anyone listening to the delegates of the left-wing opposition and the voices of the progressive media would think that the Schoof cabinet is in complete isolation in Europe. With a prime minister who stands like a lost soul in the doghouse corner of the Council building in Brussels, outdone by his colleagues with the remark: ‘Back to the polder and shame on you’. But anyone who looks closely at the spectacle at the recent European summit of heads of government must conclude: the opposite is the case.
A different wind is blowing through Europe and the Schoof cabinet is a trendsetter, however much the progressive family dislikes it. The previous cabinet, Rutte IV, had already set the turn in motion, even with D66 on board. The then state secretary for Asylum and Migration Eric van der Burg (VVD) signed, on 15 May, together with fourteen other European member states, a ‘joint letter’ about ‘new solutions’ to counter ‘uncontrolled migration’. That letter described the situation, with a rapid increase in the number of migrants, as ‘unsustainable’. Goal: ‘thinking outside the box’.
During last week’s European summit the heads of government stepped up the pace further, under the leadership of the Netherlands, Italy and Denmark. The latter two countries are led by women who know how to get things done: the conservative Giorgia Meloni and the social democrat Mette Frederiksen.
The three initiators brought the political leaders of Austria, Cyprus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Malta and Slovakia to the table with them. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was also present. She directs the bureaucratic machinery, because without the Commission there is no starting point for European legislation. Coalition-building is compulsory fare in European politics. The rest is poetry.
So who is isolated then? Progressive Netherlands, which has entrenched itself in an intellectual and political self-isolation, as a bastion on the moral high plateau. In the assumption that changing migration and asylum policy cannot and must not happen. But it does happen, see the ‘Schoof table’. Europe has changed since the European elections, but that process has passed progressive Netherlands by. All the sacred cows that the PvdA and Groen Links invoke out of their merger reflex are being ‘filed vertically’ in Brussels, headed for the wastepaper. That is of course painful, but whoever, as the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev once said, is too late, is overtaken by history. In this case at the ballot box.
What is happening now is not new in Europe. The active Kati Piri, foreign affairs spokesperson for GroenLinks-PvdA, must know that too. The legal services of the European Commission and the European Council are inventive. What seemed impossible yesterday is feasible tomorrow. The Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene once said: ‘Under high pressure everything becomes fluid’. The Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, former president of the European Union, had wanted for some time for the European migration and asylum rules to be suspended for the protection of the Polish border with Belarus and Russia (Kaliningrad). Finland wants the same for the 1,600-kilometer-long border with Russia. And so it came to pass.
And what about the southern border of the European Union? Italy is moving the reception of asylum seekers and the assessment of asylum applications to Albania. Upon rejection these locations become ‘return hubs’, a system that already somewhat resembles the method Hungary applies: detention at the border, assessment and (in most cases) deportation.
The trend is: as few asylum seekers as possible within the EU, handling of asylum requests in third countries and return to a safe region outside the EU. The best thing would be to handle asylum requests in, for example, Africa and to organize reception in cooperation with local countries. That spares asylum seekers a long, sometimes deadly, journey to Europe, organized by criminal gangs.
The aim of the current talks is to bring forward elements from the Migration and Asylum Pact of May this year, which only takes effect in 2026, and to start implementing them immediately. The pressure is great and the legal services will surely find a way.
Step by step we are moving toward ‘fortress Europe’. That is not how it is sold in Brussels, but that is what it comes down to. The external border of the EU in Southern Europe will come to resemble that with Russia and Belarus. There are of course differences, but the intention is the same: a hard border. In other words, a real border.
Now progressive Dutch people will say: but Germany, France, Belgium and Spain were not at the table with Schoof. The explanation is simple. The German chancellor Olaf Scholz leads a cabinet with the greens who, after the murderous attack in Solingen, are themselves in a political death struggle. The rudder was turned among our eastern neighbors: border controls, certainly for half a year, deportation of 28 Afghans who had committed crimes, cuts to benefits and expulsion of illegals. German socialists and greens have been forced to make a turnaround that is indigestible for the merger party GroenLinks-PvdA. On 28 September next year there are Bundestag elections in Germany.
In France prime minister Michel Barnier has already announced a stricter asylum policy, although the French constitution states that asylum requests must be handled on French territory. But then again, Corsica is also France. Belgium, under the possible new federal prime minister Bart De Wever, will immediately join the ‘Schoof group’.
The Spanish socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez is the only outspoken critic, but he will not keep that up for long. Now that Italy is taking drastic measures, the influx there is falling, but it has shifted to Spain, where the number of asylum seekers is increasing sharply. Sanchez thinks the newcomers can go to work, but he does not know his own economy. Spain has the highest unemployment in the EU: 11.3 percent. Youth unemployment is 27 percent. Spanish voters are not waiting for the arrival of immigrants.
The Schoof table will get busier because the facts are imposing themselves on the heads of government. The voter is making his voice heard, throughout Europe, on the same theme. The migration pressure will not disappear any time soon. Africa now has 1.2 billion inhabitants; by 2100 that number is estimated at around 4 billion. The migration pressure will persist throughout this century and beyond. Open or even porous borders lead to the self-abolition of Europe.
What about the isolation of progressive Netherlands? All energy is directed at the fall of the sitting cabinet and that apparently feels like a warm bath. Result: an inward-looking gaze, denial of the angry outside world and for the rest willful deafness. Even PvdA leader Frans Timmermans, former first vice-president of the current European Commission, is remarkably silent. Or is there a quarrel in the merger party?
There is certainly something to improve about the Schoof cabinet, and its governing capacity in particular could be raised. But the claim that the Netherlands is isolated in Europe with this cabinet does not hold water. The Netherlands is helping to set the trend in Europe, is part of the conversation, sits at the table and builds coalitions, while progressive Netherlands has found its refuge in dreamland.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
