Shipwrecked. Rethinking migration and asylum in Europe #Public conference 1: Democracy under pressure

Democracy under pressure – Rule of Law challenged and Europe’s shift to the right

How have the discourse and actual policies regarding migration shifted in the last years in Europe? In how far is this part of an overall shift to the right? What role do fake news and disinformation, especially since the pandemic and the war against Ukraine play a role? How can the latest EU election results be interpreted and dealt with?

Petra Molnar, lawyer and anthropologist: “I’ve spent the last six years or so trying to understand how migration is changing through the use of new technologies – that includes surveillance, different types of algorithms, visa triaging and anything in between that is impacting the way that people on the move are experiencing their journeys and how power also operates in society. […] There are people who are at the center of this technological experimentation, which is unregulated, high-risk and harmful”.

Jon Henley, Guardian’s Europe correspondent: “The absolute core ideology that ultimately defines all of Europe’s far-right parties is nativism – the belief that the native group (whatever that may be) should be the exclusive inhabitants of the native state and then anybody who comes from outside the native group, any nonnative elements, represent some kind of threat. And that obviously explains why immigration is their huge battle cry and always has been and always will be”.

Pegah Edalatian, deputy chairwoman of Alliance 90/The Greens: “In Germany we got in a lot of refugees and there was so much solidarity and sympathy and they turned it around… You know there were some real problems but the far-right and the conservatives constantly focused on chaos, on fear, and they repeated that and repeated that until the whole society’s attitude turned around towards it. So that’s also important, how right-wing people play with the emotions of people”.

Laurent Standaert, director of the Green European Foundation: “[The new European Parliament] is not a far-right European Parliament, but when you have Ursula von der Leyen coming on the stage after and saying ‘The center holds’ […] it is obviously completely fallacious. No, the center doesn’t hold, it has entirely shifted to the right. The decline of the progressives is now confirmed in ways that are more structural than even in the past and that’s the scary part”.