The European Council Summit ended on Friday, June 30th, without a joint conclusion of the Asylum and Migration Pact after Poland and Hungary remained firm in their commitment to veto the package over the forced migrant relocation scheme, which others were adamant about keeping without giving opt-outs to the Central European countries. It’s unclear if the Pact will be implemented without the member states joint approval, but even if it is, the two countries vowed not to comply with it.
What began as a friendly gathering of EU leaders produced quick results in most policy areas discussed. But by the end of the first day, the EUCO Summit descended into heated debates and, eventually, a seemingly unbreakable political deadlock. As the night settled over Brussels, only one file was left on the table: the Migration Pact.
As we wrote before, both Poland and Hungary vowed to veto the Pact unless a more favorable compromise was reached on the planned “compulsory solidarity mechanism”—an instrument that would force countries to choose between accepting relocated asylum seekers into their country or paying €22,000 per migrant into a common EU fund.
Needless to say, the two Central European countries—who have been at the forefront of the fight against mandatory migrant redistributions since 2015—do not see this choice as an acceptable compromise, but as a clear violation of their sovereignty paired with threats of financial punishment.
Battle in the moonlight
During the late hours of Thursday’s debate, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and his Hungarian colleague, Viktor Orbán refused to sign off on the deal round after round, vowing to block the entire pact unless they received guarantees of opt-outs from the migrant relocation scheme.
At one point, the roundtable discussion was suspended while Germany’s Olaf Scholz, France’s Emanuel Macron, and European Council President Charles Michel tried to persuade the Polish-Hungarian duo in private negotiations. They, too, failed to break through as the pair stood firm in their determination to block the deal.
Eventually, the meeting was called off without a conclusion around 1:00 a.m., and leaders went home vowing to try again the next day.
It’s about sending a message
At least, some of the leaders finally began to grasp the core problem here. In the eyes of the duo, the solidarity mechanism warrants a veto in itself, but it’s not the only issue. What’s really insulting is that the preliminary agreement on the Migration Pact was decided by internal ministers with qualified majority voting—not unanimity—with only 20 countries supporting it, five abstaining, and two (you guessed it) voting against it.
In the end, the Migration Pact (with forced relocations included) wouldn’t even have reached the Summit table if Poland and Hungary weren’t denied their veto rights, leaving the duo no other option but to challenge it at the Summit.
“What has been the issue today was not the Migration Pact,” Dutch PM Mark Rutte said as he left the Council chamber, “but that Hungary and Poland don’t like the way the Migration Pact was decided.” Spot on, Sherlock.
The significance of dropping the unanimity requirement has also been explained by Gladden Pappin, the President of the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs, in his recent commentary published by The European Conservative:
The EU’s change of procedure for bringing about the new quota system marks a significant departure from the norm, portending an even more federal vision of the European future. And it shows that the European Union is ready to give up on obtaining the consent of its member states in its most important decisions.
In practice, the burden of the new proposal won’t fall on the states that supported it, but on those that did not. Despite the appearance of consensus, the proposal would remove a fundamental competency of member states.
Democracy in action
Nonetheless, according to leaders arriving on the second day, the absence of a conclusion on the Pact doesn’t mean the initial agreement goes away—even though other member states, including Germany and France (with regards to climate and energy), also decided not to comply with decisions taken with a qualified majority.
“It has been decided. We can’t come back and say ‘no, no, we do not agree,’ because then everybody will open the list of all the decisions we took the last ten years,” Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel mused to reporters, making it look like Poland and Hungary supported the pact initially and now suddenly changed their minds—even though everyone knows that’s not what happened.
Understandably, Poland and Hungary not only push for excluding forced relocations but also for a joint resolution to set unanimity requirements on all further decisions on migration. Obviously, that’s not something other leaders are happy to endorse, because it would mean that every decision would risk falling into deadlock from the start, unless they learn to compromise and start respecting each others’ sovereignty.
Meloni to the rescue?
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has positioned herself as the bridge between East and West, attempting to get Morawiecki and Orbán to sign off on the Migration Pact on the sidelines of the second day.
Sending her makes sense: the conservative PM is on exceptionally friendly terms with both leaders, but since she’s representing a frontline country (which only benefits from the solidarity mechanism), her interest is to finalise the deal as soon as possible.
In the end, it seems that not even Meloni could reconcile the two fundamentally different opinions. The Summit ended without a joint approval of the migration package.
What happens now?
Despite Western leaders saying that the Migration Pact has been decided—with or without the Summit’s endorsement—the situation is not really that simple.
The fact that the Summit ended without a joint resolution casts the entire common asylum policy into uncertainty. Brussels seems to be so embarrassed that the meeting yielded no results that the Council President, Charles Michel, even cancelled his traditional press conference in the end, and EU leaders started to disperse without anyone knowing what exactly the situation entails for the future.
For now, the only thing we know is that the debate will continue in the future, and the implementation of the Migration Pact will probably be postponed until a compromise is reached. If Brussels moves to implement it without unanimous consent, it will risk open mutiny from the two countries, which have declared before that they will simply not comply with the solidarity mechanism, even if it gets adopted.
