Ever since 2015, migration has been a central issue for most European nations. It is expected to become increasingly debated in Brussels as the European Union moves closer to finalizing its new Asylum and Migration Pact before next year’s European elections.
In Greece and Turkey, however, the stakes are higher than ever right now, with migration set to steal the spotlight in the next month. Both countries are facing particularly challenging general elections in May, during which the economic strain of border control and migration will be on every voter’s mind.
Greece: No More 2020
According to polls, the ruling center-right New Democracy (ND) is still the most popular party in Greece, currently polling at 34%. However, ever since the deadly train collision that killed 57 people in late February and prompted tens of thousands of Greeks to take the streets in protest against the government, ND’s support has been slowly but surely evaporating, allowing the Radical Left (Syriza) to gradually catch up with them, now standing at 29%.
The conservative ruling party will likely have a hard time forming a government even if it wins with a slight majority, since the third and fourth most popular parties are currently the social democrat Movement for Change (11%), and the Greek Communist Party (7%), both of whom could back Syriza if needed after the May 21st vote.
However, it appears that New Democracy has found the single most important issue to mobilize voters: migration. The memory of 2020’s border clashes still lives vividly among the Greeks, especially those who reside in the northeastern part of the country, close to the Turkish border.
For them, all other aspects of this election are pretty much negligible, as they saw directly what an uncontrolled border looks like after Turkey’s President Erdoğan opened the floodgates and let tens of thousands of migrants storm the Greek border through the Evros River between the towns of Kastanies and Kipi in the spring of 2020.
Following the crisis, the government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis quickly began to construct a 37.5-kilometer-long barrier along the most critical part of the Turkish-Greek border, while enjoying widespread support for doing so. His campaign promise to extend the border fence by another 35 kilometers (for €100 million) has also gained lots of positive feedback.
But as Greece edges toward the election, ND appears to be upping its promises even more. Recently, Greek Migration Minister Notis Mitarakis went as far as to say in a TV interview that the conservative government is planning to extend the fence across the entire 200 kilometers of the Greek-Turkish border.
While it’s an ambitious plan, it’s not unfeasible, and will certainly help when the nation goes to the ballots. “If the fence hadn’t been built, we would have been in Kabul here,” a resident of Feres, close to the Turkish border, told AFP last week, describing the general sentiment in the Evros region. “We went (to the border area) with our guns. We had to secure our houses, we fired two or three times in the air,” he said, recalling the events of 2020. “A sovereign country must have ways to protect its border efficiently.”
Turkey: Economy First
In Turkey, migration is less of a security issue and more of an economic concern, as many voters think that housing and feeding the masses of people who came from Syria and the wider Middle East in recent years is too much of a burden, even if it’s part of a deal with the European Union under which Ankara gains significant financial assistance.
Looking at the numbers, the polls indicate that Erdoğan is facing his toughest election so far, currently behind both in the parliamentary and the presidential race. If measured individually, the president’s incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) is leading the polls, but since the election is going to be the clash of two giant coalition blocs, it hardly matters.
Looking at the overall support for the two opposing electoral blocs, Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance stands at only 40.6% while the opposition’s National Alliance (led by the Republican People’s Party, CHP) is just over 42.2%. While this margin looks too slim for a certain prediction of the outcome, the presidential polls have a more definitive answer. There, too, Erdoğan is behind with about 44%, while his opponent, the CHP’s Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu is repeatedly polling over 55%, comfortably above the 50% threshold needed to end the race without run-offs.
With Erdoğan likely out of the picture after May 14th, the main question in Brussels is what is going to happen with the 2016 EU-Turkey Refugee Deal. Although the deal, brokered by Erdoğan, was regarded as quite successful by both parties (except for a few weeks in 2020, as outlined above), with Turkey receiving €6 billion to shelter the migrants, it’s unlikely that a CHP government under the presidency of Kiliçdaroğlu would strike a similar one.
Focusing on an array of socio-economic issues, mostly addressing the country’s widespread poverty problem (especially after the devastating series of earthquakes earlier this year that killed 57,000 and affected some 4 million buildings, including the destruction of 345,000 residential apartments), the National Alliance (NA) has different priorities than to uphold the migration deal.
Instead, one of Kiliçdaroğlu’s main campaign promises was to send two million Syrians back to their homeland—out of the 3.4 million currently residing in Turkey under temporary protection. In its four-step solution to address the issue, NA plans to foster a more fruitful partnership with Damascus, facilitating both voluntary and forced return migration, in exchange for—perhaps—the removal of Turkish troops from northern Syria.
Another plan that we could hear more about after the election could be using large portions of the asylum seekers in the efforts to rebuild the areas most affected by the earthquakes, instead of turning to the more problematic, logistical nightmare of deportation. According to Professor Kemal Kirişci of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution, such an initiative “would reduce Syrian refugees’ dependence on humanitarian assistance, help alleviate public resentment, and diminish the prospects of secondary movements.”
Both the Greek and Turkish elections, therefore, are shaping up to be proxy votes on migration, even eight years after the initial shock of the 2015 migration crisis. This shows that the issue has long transcended electoral cycles and remains an influential topic in this part of the globe—and will be so for a long time to come.
