Most Europeans want their governments to have more control over their borders to tackle migration, polling across 23 EU countries shows. Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that “the European Union needs to allow member states much greater control of their own borders, so that countries can better manage immigration,” according to a survey of 11,714 people across Europe that was carried out by strategic communications firm FGS Global and shared exclusively with POLITICO. The findings highlight countries’ skepticism of the EU’s migration coordination, an area long defined by bickering and finger-pointing, at a time when Brussels is working on major reforms to bolster protection of the bloc’s external borders and increase support for countries that receive the bulk of arrivals.  Yet a move away from EU-level coordination and toward national border control could undermine Europe’s flagship passport-free travel zone, the Schengen area. Countries in the Schengen area — 25 of which are in the EU, while four aren’t — have committed to remove checks on internal borders. While it is possible to temporarily reintroduce controls as a last-resort response to a serious threat, that’s supposed to be limited to six-month periods, which can only be extended to up to two years. Since 2025, 12 EU governments have notified the European Commission they are imposing temporary border controls, eight of which listed migration as a motive for doing so. Some countries have in practice had border checks in place for years. EU ministers met in Cyprus last week to hash out how to halt migration across the EU’s internal borders to protect Schengen. The continued existence of the check-free travel zone “relies on trust and shared responsibility,” Cypriot Justice Minister Costas Fytiris said. That question of shared responsibility has long haunted EU migration debates, which weigh the pressure on countries that receive the bulk of arriving migrants, such as Italy and Greece, against the impact on countries elsewhere in the bloc as a result of secondary movements, i.e. onward travel from the EU country where migrants first arrive. “It’s all about responsibility on the one hand, from those countries that are at the external border. But also solidarity on the other side; from the member states which are affected by secondary movements,” Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner told POLITICO. Yet the challenge of finding an EU-level answer to immigration management remains. Throughout preparations for the first so-called solidarity pool, a framework that seeks to better share the migration burden among EU countries, governments have disagreed about who owes whom what. Support for “frontline” states such as Italy and Greece can come in the form of financial contributions or relocations — with several countries, including Belgium and Sweden, already ruling out relocations. Belgium’s Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt told POLITICO that Belgium’s initial solidarity contribution had already been lowered to €12.9 million and that the country is in talks with Italy and Greece to figure out “how we can account for historical [secondary] movements and see whether we can further lower that amount,” she said. With many countries now focused on the migratory implications of the EU’s signature borderless travel area, Luxembourg has become something of a lone Schengen crusader. The country “regrets” that the debates about Europe’s free-travel area and migration have become so intertwined, Home Affairs Minister Léon Gloden told POLITICO. “Schengen is much more than just migration.” Secondary movements aren’t a Schengen problem, he argued — they only mean that the bloc needs to cooperate better and strengthen controls on its external borders. “The illegal migration does not take place between Luxembourg and Germany,” Gloden said. The small country has lodged a complaint against migration-linked checks on Germany’s borders, which have landed the thousands of commuters that enter Luxembourg on a daily basis in major traffic jams. When the Schengen zone was built, it was “not linked to migration … [It] should facilitate the free movement of people, not hinder [it],” he said. FGS interviewed 11,714 adults from 23 European Union countries between Nov. 10 and Nov. 23, 2025. A minimum of 500 interviews were conducted in each of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Interviews were conducted online and the data was weighted to be nationally representative of each country by gender, age, income, region and socio-economic group. Data from a nationally representative poll of 500 adults is accurate to a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percent at 95 percent confidence.

SEPARATED BY WAR — AND BY SCHENGEN Designed to keep Europe safe, a security system is trapping Ukrainian ex-prisoners — including victims of Russian occupation — leaving families torn apart with no clear path out of legal limbo. By EKATERINA BODYAGINA Yuliia Hetman, 35, holds a photograph of her son Bogdan in the room where she is temporarily living in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO Vitaly and Bogdan Osipov found refuge from Russia’s full-scale invasion in central Germany, but for nearly two years the father and son have been waiting for Yuliia Hetman — Vitaly’s partner and Bogdan’s mother — to join them. What keeps the family apart is no longer the war itself, but a European Union database.  The family is among a growing number of Ukrainians caught in a trap created by the bloc’s security architecture. Ukrainian nationals serving sentences in Ukrainian prisons seized by Russian forces — or who were forcibly transferred to Russia by occupying forces during the war — are being flagged in the EU’s Schengen Information System as potential threats to public order and internal security. Advertisement Hetman, who was serving a sentence for violent crime in a Mariupol prison when the war began, completed her sentence under Russian occupation. She has since managed to leave the occupied city, but she cannot reunite with her family in Germany, stalled at the Polish border by a German-issued alert that bars her from entering much of Europe. “These people survived war, abduction and abuse in Russian detention,” said Hanna Skrypka, a lawyer at the Kyiv-based NGO Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine. “They are victims of war crimes — not security threats.” Our investigation found that Ukrainian authorities shared with law-enforcement agency Europol the names of at least 3,738 former prisoners who had been held in penal institutions in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO. Vitaly Osipov, 48, and his son Bogdan, 13, found refuge in the central German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO While Ukrainian authorities say they made no requests to flag individuals in the EU’s Schengen Information System, former detainees, rights groups and lawyers say the information-sharing coincided with a surge in entry bans — separating families and leaving former prisoners trapped by opaque security decisions they cannot meaningfully challenge. “We should be very careful not to treat Ukrainians from temporarily occupied territories as a security threat by default,” said Thijs Reuten, a Dutch center-left MEP and the European Parliament’s shadow rapporteur on Ukraine. “Ukrainians are our allies — they are fighting for their freedom and for democracy.” “Once someone is on a list,” continued Reuten, “who is accountable for getting them off?”  FROM A BESIEGED PRISON TO A CLOSED BORDER Hetman was three years into a five-year sentence, for causing bodily harm to a man she says assaulted her, when women’s penal colony No. 107 in Mariupol was sealed off from the outside world in February 2022. Prison authorities suspended access to telephones and television as Russia launched its full-scale invasion. “We suspected something was happening, but didn’t know what exactly,” she recalled. Soon, shelling began. Prison staff fled. Water and electricity disappeared. Toilets were destroyed. The women dug pits, cooked over open fires and slept in basements. About a month into Russia’s assault on Mariupol, Russian forces took control of the city’s women’s prison — subjecting the Ukrainian prisoners held there to a harsher regime marked by forced labor and arbitrary rules. Yuliia stands in front of the bombed-out house next to her temporary accommodation in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO “Life changed completely,” Hetman says. “For the smallest violation, everyone was punished.” Forty kilometers away, Osipov and his son were hiding in the basement of their neighbors’ house, near the home where the family had lived together before Yuliia’s imprisonment — surviving on canned food they cooked over open fires. Neither partner knew the other was alive.  After nearly six months underground, volunteers offered Osipov a route into the European Union via Russia and Belarus. Before leaving Ukraine, he and his 13-year-old son Bogdan braved Russian shelling to visit the penal colony in Mariupol. Osipov explained to a Russian soldier at the gate that Hetman had been imprisoned inside. The soldier let him enter. “We saw each other and burst into tears,” recalled Osipov. Advertisement Hetman completed her sentence a year later. After her release in September 2023, she made plans to travel to Germany, where Osipov and Bogdan had settled in Rotenburg an der Fulda, a quiet riverside town where relatives already lived. Vitaly and Bogdan cleaned their apartment, bought groceries — and waited. Then, early one morning, Hetman called from the Ukrainian-Polish border, crying. “They won’t let me in,” she said, according to Osipov’s recollection.  Polish authorities at the Dorohusk checkpoint told her she was barred from entering the European Union. They had found her name attached to an alert in the Schengen Information System.  INSIDE THE DATABASE THAT SEPARATED A UKRAINIAN FAMILY Europe’s guaranteed freedom of movement relies on a database. The Schengen Information System joins the bloc’s border-control and law-enforcement authorities to share real-time alerts during police checks and along its external perimeter. The system consists of a central database technically operated by the EU agency eu-LISA, under the oversight of the European Commission, national systems in each participating country, and a secure network linking them. How and why individuals are entered into the Schengen Information System can be difficult to trace — including for those affected by the listings themselves. Each Schengen country is responsible for creating, maintaining and enforcing its own alerts, which are immediately visible and enforceable across all other participating states. While national authorities formally refuse entry at the external border checkpoints they manage, the underlying decision to place an SIS alert may have been taken earlier by another member state, without the involvement of the country carrying out the check. Advertisement Information relevant to SIS alerts may be shared via Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence and law-enforcement coordination agency, which has no arrest powers of its own but facilitates the exchange of information among national authorities via coordination offices known as SIRENE bureaus. Europol itself does not issue SIS alerts, but information shared through the agency may be passed on to member states, which then decide independently whether to enter or maintain an alert. Hetman’s name appears to have found its way into the database as part of the list of former prisoners in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories shared with Europol in early 2023. While Ukrainian authorities say their government shared the list for informational purposes only, Hetman’s name later appeared in the Schengen Information System “for the purpose of refusing entry,” according to a Polish border refusal decision reviewed by POLITICO. The alert appears to have originated in Germany. The country’s Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed, in a response to a data-access request reviewed by POLITICO, that the refusal-of-entry alert was issued by Germany and remains in force unless withdrawn by the issuing authority. (A certificate from Poland’s Office for Foreigners shows that Poland did not play a role.) Germany’s federal police office said there was no blanket treatment of former detainees as a security risk and that it had no knowledge of such a practice. The agency did not respond to follow-up questions after we identified documents showing that German authorities had issued refusal-of-entry alerts in multiple such cases. Yuliia in the room where she is currently living in Kyiv. | Johanna Maria Fritz/Agentur Ostkreuz for POLITICO Polish border guards told POLITICO that they see only the identifying data and the instruction to refuse entry — not the reasons for the listing — and conduct no individualized assessment at the border. Issuing authorities may lawfully withhold that information on security grounds, leaving affected individuals aware of the ban but often unable to determine why it was imposed or how to challenge it. The structure leaves responsibility fragmented: Information flows across borders, but decision-making and accountability remain national — and often opaque. In five separate instances reviewed by POLITICO involving former Ukrainian prisoners who served sentences in Russian-occupied territories or who were forcibly transferred by Russian forces from Ukrainian prisons, border authorities across multiple EU countries enforced entry bans based solely on active SIS alerts, without citing any issues with passports, visas, overstays or travel documents. According to Skrypka, a small number of former prisoners who still had valid passports were able to cross directly from Russia into the Schengen area in early 2023. She said she was aware of five such cases, all of which occurred before Ukrainian authorities shared a list of former prisoners with Europol. After that information-sharing, she said, at least 10 former prisoners who attempted the same route were refused entry at Schengen borders. The organization now advises former prisoners not to attempt to cross those borders. Advertisement Europol confirmed to POLITICO that it processes “operational data” from Ukraine under a long-standing cooperation agreement, but did not address whether information about former Ukrainian prisoners was later shared with member states in a way that contributed to SIS refusal-of-entry bans. In a written reply to POLITICO, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said it is overseeing criminal investigations into the deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainians from occupied territories to Russia or Crimea — acts classified under Ukrainian law as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The office added that it had no information indicating that former detainees recognized as victims in such proceedings were treated as security threats or subjected to restrictions abroad, including difficulties crossing borders or reuniting with family members. “Why Ukrainian authorities passed the list to Europol, we don’t know,” said Skrypka, whose Kyiv-based NGO supports Ukrainian prisoners and documents abuses linked to Russian aggression. “What does Europol have to do with it?” HOW A SCHENGEN ALERT FOLLOWS UKRAINIANS ACROSS BORDERS Vasyl Soldatov, 48, a Ukrainian former prisoner forcibly transferred to Russia during the war, was released in May 2025 into Russian-occupied Crimea. By then, his wife was living in the Czech Republic as a war refugee, and he hoped to continue his arduous journey directly to her. Soldatov explored his potential routes from Crimea to the Czech Republic. While still in Crimea, Soldatov was informed by Czech authorities he was subject to a refusal-of-entry alert in the Schengen system, entered not by the Czech Republic but — as in Hetman’s case — by German authorities. Advertisement In a written response reviewed by POLITICO, Czech police said Soldatov is not listed in the country’s national register of “undesirable persons” and stressed that there is no general practice or internal instruction to automatically treat people who have been held in, or transferred through, occupied territories of Ukraine as security risks.  Both EU and national laws require Schengen refusal-of-entry alerts to be based on objective, case-specific grounds. Prisoners-rights advocates argue that some European countries were violating that standard by instead using automatic or collective groupings, like the generalized suspicion attached to the label “former prisoner.” Hugues de Suremain, legal director of the European Prison Litigation Network, added that while Ukrainian authorities have cited risks of coercion or recruitment by Russian security services in general terms, he has not seen evidence of documented, individualized assessments that would justify blanket measures applied without individual review. Without that, said de Suremain, war-affected detainees risk being treated as suspects by default. Vitaly and Bogdan have not seen their partner and mother, Yuliia, since the summer of 2022. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO Germany’s Interior Ministry told POLITICO that refusal-of-entry alerts are issued following individualized assessments and that authorities may take into account information received via Europol when evaluating security risks. The ministry said it does not keep statistics on how often such alerts are applied to specific categories and declined to comment on concerns raised by human rights organizations that former detainees could be treated as security risks due to fears of recruitment by Russian intelligence services. However, neither Germany’s Interior Ministry nor Federal Criminal Police Office explained how such individualized assessments were conducted in cases involving former Ukrainian prisoners, or whether information shared via Europol contributed to those decisions. “Once a name starts circulating through law-enforcement channels, it can be very hard to undo,” said de Suremain, who represents several former Ukrainian prisoners before the European Court of Human Rights. Advertisement Like many former prisoners who find their movements blocked, Soldatov still does not know exactly how his name entered the database. While individuals have the right to seek access to, correction or deletion of SIS data, requests must be directed to the country that entered the alert, and authorities may lawfully withhold the underlying grounds in security-related cases. In the case of Poland, the country’s Ombudsman office said in a statement that when database entries rely on classified security-service information, individuals may be unable to see or meaningfully challenge the evidence against them, leaving judicial review as the primary safeguard. Soldatov, meanwhile, managed to return to Ukraine with help from Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine, traveling from Crimea into Russia and then via Belarus. He is counting the days until May, when Czech authorities have told him the Schengen Information System refusal-of-entry order will expire. WHEN SECURITY SYSTEMS LEAVE NO SAFE ROUTE Even former Russian prisoners who do not intend to live in the European Union, but simply seek to pass through it on their way back to Ukraine, can be blocked by Schengen refusal-of-entry alerts. For Ukrainians released from Russian prisons, legal exit routes are limited. Reaching Ukraine typically requires traversing Russia’s western borders, including into Schengen states such as Norway, Finland, Estonia or Latvia — where former prisoners flagged in the Schengen system are turned away even when seeking only onward travel back to Ukraine.  Passage through Belarus, meanwhile, remains an option only for those with valid Ukrainian passports — documents many former prisoners no longer have. Eastern Ukraine remains an active war zone. Advertisement That typically forces those hoping to leave Russia for Ukraine to route themselves through Georgia, where former prisoners can approach the Ukrainian embassy to obtain documents and then attempt onward travel through third countries. But when problems arise at the Russian–Georgian border — including transit refusals or prolonged administrative detention — the journey can collapse altogether. Last summer, 80 former detainees were held for weeks in a windowless basement near one border crossing, dependent on charities for food and medical care, their attorneys argued to the European Court for Human Rights. “People cannot reunite with their families — and they cannot even get home safely,” said Skrypka. “SIS entry bans affect both.” THE LONG WAIT For Osipov, every weekday now begins the same way. At 5 a.m., after preparing breakfast for his son Bogdan, he boards a commuter train for a 30-minute ride to a fish-processing facility in nearby Neukirchen, where he spends the day washing and sorting caviar. He returns home around nine in the evening, cooks dinner for his son — and prepares lunch for the next day. “At work, phones are forbidden except during breaks. I call Bogdan immediately,” Osipov says. “My heart bleeds knowing he’s alone all day.” Vitaly and Bogdan in their apartment in Rotenburg an der Fulda, Germany. | Alex Kraus for POLITICO They haven’t seen Hetman since the summer of 2022. “My son asks every day when his mother will come,” Osipov says. “I have no answer.” Those who work on Ukraine issues in Brussels say they know of no coordinated effort to reassess how Schengen security systems are applied to Ukrainians who spent time in Russian-run prisons.“This is a special situation that needs to be dealt with in a special way,” said Reuten, the European Parliament’s shadow rapporteur on Ukraine. “Otherwise, we risk separating people from their families for years during wartime — and that is unacceptable.”

BRUSSELS — A new EU rule mandating that a higher proportion of passengers pass through electronic identity border checks risks “wreaking significant discomfort on travelers,” warned the head of the bloc’s airport lobby. But a Commission spokesperson insisted that the electronic check system, which first went into limited use in October with a higher proportion of travelers to be checked from Friday, “has operated largely without issues.” The new Entry/Exit System is aimed at replacing passport stamps and cracking down on illegal stays in the bloc. Under the new system, travelers from third countries like the U.K. and the U.S. must register fingerprints and a facial image the first time they cross the frontier before reaching a border officer. But those extra steps are causing delays. In October, 10 percent of passengers had to use the new system; as of Friday, at least 35 percent of non-EU nationals entering the Schengen area for a short stay must use it. By April 10, the system will be fully in place. Its introduction last year caused issues at many airports, and industry worries that Friday’s step-up will cause a repeat. The EES “has resulted in border control processing times at airports increasing by up to 70 percent, with waiting times of up to three hours at peak traffic periods,” said Olivier Jankovec, director general of ACI Europe, adding that Friday’s new mandate is “sure to create even worse conditions.” Brussels Airport spokesperson Ihsane Chioua Lekhli said: “The introduction of EES has an impact on the waiting time for passengers and increases the need for sufficient staffing at border control,” adding: “Peak waiting times at arrival (entry of Belgium) can go up to three hours, and we also saw an increase of waiting times at departures.” But the Commission rejected the accusation that EES is wreaking havoc at EU airports. “Since its start, the system has operated largely without issues, even during the peak holiday period, and any initial challenges typical of new systems have been effectively addressed, moreover with it, we know who enter in the EU, when, and where,” said Markus Lammert, the European Commission’s spokesperson for internal affairs. Lamert said countries “have refuted the claim” made by ACI Europe of increased waiting times and that concerns over problems related to the new 35 percent threshold have been “disproven.” That’s in stark contrast with the view of the airport lobby, which pointed to recent problems in Portugal. Under the new system, travelers from third countries like the U.K. and the U.S. must register fingerprints and a facial image the first time they cross the frontier before reaching a border officer. | iStock “There are mounting operational issues with the EES rollout — the case in point being the suspension of the system by the Portuguese government over the holidays,” Jankovec said. In late December, the Portuguese government suspended the EES at Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport for three months and deployed military personnel to bolster border control capabilities. ADR, which operates Rome Fiumicino Airport, is also seeing issues. “Operational conditions are proving highly complex, with a significant impact on passenger processing times at border controls,” ADR said in a written reply. Spain’s hotel industry association asked the country’s interior ministry to beef up staffing, warning of “recurring bottlenecks at border controls.” “It is unreasonable that, after a journey of several hours, tourists should face waits of an hour or more to enter the country,” said Jorge Marichal, the lobby’s president. The Spanish interior ministry said the EES is being used across the country with “no queues or significant incidents reported to date.” However, not all airports are having trouble implementing the new system. The ADP Group, which manages the two largest airports in Paris, said it has “not observed any chaos or increase in waiting times at this stage.”

BERLIN — Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt invited European Union counterparts to a migration summit on Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain in the Bavarian Alps, to draft proposals for stricter migration rules. Dobrindt, the Bavarian conservative in charge of executing German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s tough-on-migration turn, is set to host talks with interior ministers from France, Poland, Austria, Denmark and the Czech Republic on July 18. Also invited is the EU’s new migration czar, Austrian conservative Magnus Brunner, a spokesperson for the interior ministry in Berlin told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook. “Citizens rightly expect order, and more control and cooperation from politicians instead of powerlessness. We want to send this signal,” Dobrindt told POLITICO. The aim of the summit is a declaration containing concrete ideas — including on border protection and deporting rejected asylum-seekers to so-called third countries, or countries outside the EU — that are to be jointly pushed forward at the European level, according to the interior ministry. Germany was long among the EU countries with a more liberal approach toward migration. But the current government, led by Merz, has vowed to drastically cut the inflow of asylum-seekers under pressure from the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the largest opposition party in Germany’s parliament. Just days after taking office this spring, Merz’s interior minister beefed up checks on Germany’s borders and vowed German police would turn away undocumented immigrants, including asylum-seekers — a move most experts deemed against EU law. The border crackdown fomented tensions between Germany and its neighbors, with politicians in France, Poland and Austria criticizing Merz’s government for inhibiting the free movement of people and goods within the Schengen Area. Earlier this week, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Warsaw’s patience with Germany “is becoming exhausted” as he announced new checks on his country’s borders with Germany and Lithuania. Dobrindt and Merz defended the national border checks by arguing they are a temporary step while they work toward migration reforms on the EU level. “We must strengthen the possibility of repatriation,” Dobrindt told German magazine Focus in an interview earlier this week. “This requires the removal of the connecting element, as entailed in the CEAS, according to which refugees must have a connection to the country to which they are returned,” he continued, referring to the Common European Asylum System. “We want to abolish this and at the same time expand our strategic partnerships with third countries,” he added, without naming specific countries. In a similar move in May, the European Commission proposed changing EU law to allow the deportation of migrants to countries outside the EU — a proposal that human rights groups sharply criticized. In separate comments, Dobrindt also told Focus he wants to close a deal with the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan to deport Afghans who were found to have committed crimes in Germany. He would consider making “agreements directly with Afghanistan to enable repatriations,” he said. All diplomatic and political ties between Berlin and Kabul were cut when the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

Political posturing over migration has delivered yet another blow to Europe’s beleaguered free-travel zone. Faced with right-wing demands at home to control the flow of people arriving from outside the EU’s borders, the leaders of Poland and Germany are seeking easy wins which might placate populists — but put the once-sacred Schengen area on life support. Warsaw’s patience with Germany sending migrants back to Poland “is becoming exhausted,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said, as he announced the imposition of checks on his country’s borders with Germany and Lithuania from July 7. Almost four decades after the introduction of the borderless travel area that encompasses 450 million people from 29 countries — four of which aren’t in the EU — supposedly temporary border controls in the name of exceptional security concerns are increasingly the norm, creating the impression Schengen exists more in name than in substance. But with the rise of far-right parties and several years of migration from Ukraine — and before that, the Middle East — carveouts to the border-free zone rules have become an easy solution for politicians looking to show they mean action. “We consider the introduction of controls necessary,” Tusk said, pointing the finger at Germany’s “unilateral” action. In May, the conservative-led government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz ramped up checks on Germany’s borders, including with Poland, following pressure from Berlin’s own opposition party, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Warsaw’s patience with Germany sending migrants back to Poland “is becoming exhausted,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said. | Rafal Guz/EPA German police will turn away more undocumented immigrants, including asylum seekers, Merz said. The move further bolstered border controls the previous government had already put in place October 2023. The crackdown riled Germany’s neighbors, including Poland, despite Merz’s promises to step up Berlin’s relationship with Warsaw — an alliance he considers key for driving a united European defense policy. While politicians have warned Germany’s controls could chip away at the free movement of people and goods within the Schengen area, critics have also called the border measures largely symbolic. Poland’s Fakt newspaper said that German authorities returned 1,087 people to Poland between May 1 and June 15 this year, pointing out that those numbers aren’t significantly different from last year’s. According to German police union figures, the new checks led to 160 asylum applicants being rejected in the first four weeks. It’s a small fraction of total refusals — on average, up to 1,300 people per week are rejected for lacking the necessary documentation. Germany’s move, however, has created a political problem for Tusk’s ruling centrist Civic Coalition. Having narrowly lost the presidential election to the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, it’s feeling the hot breath of rightwing opposition parties that want a tougher stance on migration. Civic Coalition and PiS are currently neck-and-neck in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls and the hard-right Confederation has surged since the last general election in 2023. All 3 Years 2 Years 1 Year 6 Months Smooth Kalman Polish civilian vigilante groups tied to right-wing parties are staging patrols along the frontier with Germany. “Poland’s western border is ceasing to exist,” Mariusz Błaszczak, a senior PiS politician, warned last week. He blamed Tusk’s “servility toward Berlin.” Sławomir Mentzen, a Confederation leader, accused the Polish Border Guard of cooperating with Germany in accepting illegal migrants. The government has denounced those attacks. “Don’t play politics with Poland’s security. This is not the time or place for such actions,” Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s interior minister, said on X.  Poland’s retaliatory controls have also put Merz’s border policy in the firing line, with Germany’s left-wing opposition painting Warsaw’s decision as a clear setback. “This is a devastating signal for a German government and a ‘foreign chancellor’ Merz, who promised to regain trust in Europe,” Chantal Kopf, a lawmaker for the Greens, told POLITICO. Knut Abraham, a member of Merz’s conservatives and the government’s coordinator for the German-Polish relationship, in an interview with Welt also warned against lasting checks. While they are “necessary as a political signal that migration policy in Germany has changed … the solution cannot be to push migrants back and forth between Poland and Germany or to cement border controls on both sides,” he said. Merz on Tuesday defended Germany’s border checks. “We naturally want to preserve this Schengen area, but freedom of movement in the Schengen area will only work in the long term if it is not abused by those who promote irregular migration, in particular by smuggling migrants,” he said.

Poland will introduce temporary controls on its borders with Germany and Lithuania as of July 7, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Tuesday. The move follows rising tension over illegal migration within the European free travel zone. Tusk warned on Monday that his country would reimpose checks on the Polish-German border if it found that Germany was sending irregular migrants to Poland, Lithuanian media reported. He also said his country would take measures to prevent illegal border crossings from the Lithuanian side, as Poland had “a lot of effort, money, sweat and, unfortunately, some blood, to make the eastern border with Belarus air-tight.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday defended Germany’s border checks. “We naturally want to preserve this Schengen area, but freedom of movement in the Schengen area will only work in the long term if it is not abused by those who promote irregular migration, in particular by smuggling migrants,” he said. The interior ministers of Germany and Poland had discussed the situation during a lengthy phone call on Monday evening, Merz said in Berlin. “We are also talking to the Polish government about joint controls in the respective border hinterland,” the chancellor said. In response to Polish media reports, Merz said he wanted to clarify that Berlin did not push back asylum seekers who had already arrived. “Some people here are claiming that there is, so to speak, regular repatriation tourism from Germany to Poland … That is not the case,” he said. This story is being updated.

BERLIN — Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said he sees German Chancellor Friedrich Merz as a key partner in drastically cutting irregular migration to Europe even as tensions simmer between their countries over Berlin’s domestic border crackdown. “We need a solution to ensure that procedures take place at the external [European Union] border,” Stocker told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook Podcast, speaking of asylum claims. “Protecting our internal borders in the Schengen area cannot be the last answer. This can only be an emergency solution,” he said ahead of planned talks with Merz in Berlin on Friday. “I am very happy that I have a partner in Friedrich Merz who sees these things very similarly,” Stocker added. Stocker said he viewed Austria as “a pioneer” in promoting stricter European policies on asylum claims. Germany has long pushed back on some of the tougher European migration proposals, but Merz’s arrival has shifted that paradigm. Under pressure from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) opposition party, Merz’s conservative-led government has vowed to drastically cut the inflow of asylum seekers to the country. Just days after taking office this spring Merz’s interior minister increased checks on Germany’s borders — including with Austria — and said German police would turn away more undocumented immigrants, including asylum seekers. The border crackdown led to tensions between Germany and its neighbors, with politicians in France, Poland and Austria criticizing Merz’s government for inhibiting the free movement of people and goods within the Schengen area. Ultimately, the number of asylum seekers turned away at Germany’s borders was low, leading critics to disparage Merz’s crackdown as largely symbolic. Stocker downplayed the suggestion that Germany’s border controls had created significant tensions between the two countries, instead siding with Merz to form a tough-on-migration axis within Europe. “I believe that these restrictions do not have a major impact,” he said of the border controls. “If there is a need to control an internal border, and we have done so ourselves … I cannot deny other countries doing the same. In other words, these border controls are ultimately a solution that is not intended to be permanent, but sometimes it is a necessary one.” Germany has long pushed back on some of the tougher European migration proposals, but Friedrich Merz’s arrival has shifted that paradigm. | Oliver Matthys/EPA Prior to the European Council summit in Brussels on Thursday, Merz attended a gathering of anti-immigration European leaders that included Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen. “We are back on board with the topic of migration,” an official from the German chancellery said. Stocker, whose centrist coalition is also under pressure from the far right, said he favors the Commission’s plan to overhaul the EU’s deportation system, called for heightened controls on the bloc’s external borders, and urged that asylum procedures take place on Europe’s borders instead of within member states. “It’s a matter of coordinating our positions, while also coordinating how we deal with the issues discussed in the European Council at the European level,” Stocker said ahead of his Friday meeting with Merz.

LONDON — Britain and the EU have agreed a fresh Brexit deal that will see Gibraltar open its borders with Spain, abolish passport controls with the EU, and join the EU customs union. The British Overseas Territory will effectively join the EU’s Schengen passport-free area for the first time — meaning smoother crossings for the 15,000 people who commute across its borders daily. Speaking in Brussels on Wednesday, EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič described the agreement as a “truly historic milestone” that would remove “all physical barriers, checks and controls on people and goods” crossing the border while bringing legal certainty. Gibraltar’s government has sought such a deal for years — complaining that border crossings have become more onerous since Brexit, to the detriment of people living and working in the territory. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said the agreement meant that “the last wall on continental Europe” would disappear and free movement of people would reign. THE SHAPE OF THE DEAL To protect the integrity of the Schengen area, EU border controls will operate alongside British controls at the Rock’s airport — in a setup similar to the “juxtaposed controls” operating at London St Pancras Eurostar station. The territory has also made some concessions on taxation — notably on its very low tobacco levies. Albares said the “tax convergence process” would “ensure everyone is treated fairly.” While the deal includes a specific clause stating that it has no impact on the territory’s British sovereignty, it is unlikely to be welcomed by Euroskeptics back in the U.K. — for some of whom the territory is an emotive subject. Asked whether EU border guards would be able to stop British nationals from entering the British Overseas Territory, the Spanish foreign minister said: “Of course the European agent — that in this case is the Spanish police — will guarantee the full integrity of the Schengen area.” In a written statement issued on Wednesday afternoon, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the situation his party inherited from the last government — which was in the process of negotiating a similar agreement — had put “Gibraltar’s economy and way of life under threat.” He said the deal would deliver “a practical solution after years of uncertainty.” Meanwhile, Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s chief minister, said he was “delighted” with the agreement in principle. “I have worked hand in glove with the U.K. government throughout this negotiation to deliver the deal Gibraltar wants and needs — one that will protect future generations of British Gibraltarians and does not in any way affect our British sovereignty.” Both sides will now get to work turning the political agreement in principle into a legal text. Asked whether he believed the deal would be ratified, Šefčovič said he was “absolutely convinced.”

BERLIN — Poland’s top diplomat in Berlin has criticized the incoming German government’s plans to tighten border controls just days before the new regime is set to take office. “The current controls at the German-Polish border are already a problem for daily border traffic and the functioning of the EU internal market,” Poland’s chief diplomat in Berlin, Jan Tombiński, told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook. “We therefore do not want to see a tightening of border controls.” The conservatives of chancellor-to-be Friedrich Merz and his Cabinet, who are set to take power in Berlin next Tuesday in a coalition government with the center-left Social Democratic Party, have long promised a tougher stance on migration in order to win back voters on the right. Merz vowed to introduce stricter border checks on his first day in office and to reject illegal crossings, including of asylum-seekers. “Anyone who tries to enter Germany illegally must expect to be stopped at the German border from May 6,” Thorsten Frei, the incoming head of the Chancellery, a powerful role akin to a chief of staff, reinforced earlier this week. When asked whether Poland would accept the return of asylum-seekers, Tombiński emphasized that Warsaw stands by its “obligations under EU legislation.” He explained that this includes the reform of the Common European Asylum System. Under the CEAS, countries may not reject asylum-seekers at their internal borders. A spokesperson for the Austrian interior ministry told POLITICO, “We are confident that the actions of the German authorities at the EU’s internal borders are in line with the legal system.” The spokesperson added: “The European Court of Justice has ruled that informal returns are not legally possible when an application for asylum is made.” Merz — whose top campaign promises also included pledges to improve relations with Germany’s neighbors (including Poland), and to take a more proactive position on the European stage — is set to travel to Warsaw on Wednesday, where he’ll have to defend his tough border policy. “Our aim is to achieve more at the European level, too. I am already holding talks with European partners on this,” Alexander Dobrindt, the incoming interior minister, said in an interview Thursday, without naming specific countries. “CEAS is going in the right direction, but is too slow … We want to achieve more,” he added. In order to conduct stricter border controls without overburdening its work force, the German police would need at least 20,000 more staff members, according to the chief of the country’s police union, Jochen Kopelke.    “We do not consider comprehensive controls and returns at German borders to be realistically feasible,” he added, in light of Germany’s 3,700-plus kilometers of borders.

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Gerald Knaus analysiert im Gespräch mit Gordon Repinski den neuen Koalitionsvertrag und benennt konkret, was eine echte Migrationswende ermöglichen könnte – und was bloß Symbolpolitik bleibt.  Es geht um Abschiebungen nach Afghanistan, sichere Herkunftsstaaten, das EU-Türkei-Abkommen, Drittstaatenlösungen, z.B. mit Kenia und um die Frage, ob Friedrich Merz und Alexander Dobrindt liefern können. Ein Gespräch über Realismus, Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Europas Verantwortung. Gerald Knaus ist Migrationsforscher und Gründer der Denkfabrik European Stability Initiative (ESI). Er gilt als Architekt des EU-Türkei-Abkommens von 2016 und berät seit Jahren Regierungen in Europa in Fragen der Migrationspolitik. Knaus verbindet wissenschaftliche Analyse mit politischer Umsetzbarkeit – und bleibt dabei ein kompromissloser Verteidiger rechtsstaatlicher Prinzipien.  In dieser Folge liefert er eine präzise Diagnose zur Lage – und einen konkreten Vorschlag für den Weg aus der Sackgasse. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es morgens um 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team bringen euch jeden Morgen auf den neuesten Stand in Sachen Politik — kompakt, europäisch, hintergründig. Und für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Unser Berlin Playbook-Newsletter liefert jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Hier gibt es alle Informationen und das kostenlose Playbook-Abo. Mehr von Berlin Playbook-Host und Executive Editor von POLITICO in Deutschland, Gordon Repinski, gibt es auch hier:   Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski.