The far right is steering the EU’s response on migration | Letter

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I agree with much of Alberto Alemanno’s analysis (How the far right is tightening its grip over the EU – from the inside, 18 August), but I wonder whether framing this primarily as the far right tightening its grip on the EU risks missing an even more troubling development.

What we are witnessing is not simply the success of the far right. It is a broader cultural shift within the European political mainstream. Migration is perhaps the clearest example. The convergence between governments as politically different as those of Denmark and Italy suggests that positions once associated with the radical right have travelled well beyond it. Parts of the centre-left and centre-right have progressively abandoned a rights-based understanding of migration. More fundamentally, migrants increasingly disappear from the European political conversation as persons – as bearers of rights whose dignity should constitute a limit to what political majorities may legitimately do.

This cultural transformation has been facilitated by an increasingly weak European Commission. The second Ursula von der Leyen commission was born under the auspices of a strong presidency, but that political authority seems to have progressively evaporated. The response to the Ceuta crisis is revealing. Neither the commission’s president, Von der Leyen, nor its European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, Magnus Brunner, has provided the kind of strong political signal that might counterbalance the competitive hardening of national positions.

The problem, therefore, may be deeper than the collapse of the traditional firewall around the far right. The firewall becomes almost irrelevant once much of the mainstream has internalised the assumptions that it was originally supposed to contain.

The real question is no longer simply whether mainstream parties cooperate with the far right, but how much of the far right’s understanding of migration, rights and belonging has already become mainstream European common sense.
Giuseppe Martinico
Professor of comparative public law, Dirpolis Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

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