The video put together by the Hungarian government opens to an ominous soundtrack. A man the footage claims is a migrant, who has just made it over the border into the central European state, is seen holding a long wooden plank.
A police car approaches and the man throws the plank in its direction before running back up a ladder and through a gap in a razor-wire fence, retreating back across Hungary’s border into Serbia.
The footage continues, showing several other clips of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to get over border fences into Hungary. Some men are shown throwing sand and rocks in the direction of border guard vehicles.
The short video dramatically pauses for a number of close-ups showing border guards with cuts on their arms and damaged patrol cars. The message – delivered with the subtlety of a cement truck reversing around a corner – is that migrants and asylum seekers crossing into the European Union are a dangerous threat.
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When Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban’s far-right government circulated the video to Brussels-based journalists last year, the footage was privately mocked as a low-budget stab at anti-immigrant propaganda.
Orban, who has been in power in Hungary since 2010, is the most hard-line of the EU’s national leaders when it comes to migration. His response to the large numbers of people fleeing the Middle East and elsewhere to Europe in 2015 was to crack down.
A tall razorwire fence was erected to prevent asylum seekers from crossing from the Balkans into Hungary. New legislation made it virtually impossible for people to claim asylum and gave authorities powers to detain people in “transit zones” near the Serbian border. The approach was condemned by the European Court of Justice, which fined Hungary €200 million for systematically disregarding EU asylum laws.
A decade on from the start of the migration “crisis”, many EU states are taking harsher stances. Most are under pressure from far-right opposition parties, or reliant on their support to remain in power.
The moving of the centre dial rightward was obvious during a recent reporting trip to Poland’s border with Belarus. The Polish border guard had also put together a video, playing up threats from migrants. Footage from their camera network showed groups of men, in some cases holding tools, planks of wood or ladders, trying to cut through or scale Poland’s border fence.
Poland has been accused of pushing migrants back across the border into Belarus, breaching laws to guard asylum seekers from being sent somewhere they could be at risk.
The pushbacks started under the populist, right-wing Law and Justice government, but have not stopped since prime minister Donald Tusk’s centrist, pro-EU coalition came to power a year ago.
Tusk has argued that Poland is facing different circumstances to Hungary, which is true. Russian president Vladimir Putin and his autocratic ally in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, have been accused of weaponising migration in a bid to destabilise European governments.
EU and Nato states accuse Russian and Belarusian authorities of flying asylum seekers in from Africa and the Middle East, then transporting them to the borders of EU states and helping them get across. In response, Tusk plans to suspend the right of people coming from Belarus to claim asylum.
The fact an asylum seeker from Eritrea, Sudan or Afghanistan may find themselves at Poland’s border as a result of Putin’s ulterior motives does not mean they are any less entitled to protection. Yet the plan to shut off access to asylum at the EU’s eastern border met with no dissent from Ireland or other member states.
No one is happier than Orban that centrist governments have begun to pick from his extremist playbook on migration. Ideas that were rejected years ago as non-starters, such as sending failed asylum seekers to deportation camps outside EU borders, are now on the menu.
The likely next chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, who leads the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has promised asylum policies that could just as easily have come from the manifesto of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
A coalition government in the Netherlands led by Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom has talked about suspending the right to seek asylum there. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, led by Herbert Kickl, is in talks to enter government with the centre-right People’s Party. Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government in Italy is trying to revive a controversial scheme to process asylum seekers in Albania.
Poland and other EU states bordering Belarus and Russia have been given a pass by Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission to temporarily disregard what previously were fundamental obligations to asylum seekers.
All of this only normalises the extreme migration policies of the far right, something those in the political centre will probably come to regret down the line.
