JAnez Janša has tweeted about her sore fingers for several days. His message in Sunday’s version was: “The EU will not open any European’humanitarian’ or immigration corridors to Afghanistan. We will not allow the recurrence of the 2015 strategic mistakes.” Therefore, only work directly for NATO and the EU. Those who have passed will be helped. The conservative head of the Slovenian government decided to speak on behalf of the entire coalition-the country currently serves as the semi-annual rotating chairman of the Council of Ministers. In fact, only two countries support his position: Austria and Hungary. High-level officials in most other countries and EU institutions want to prevent immigration waves like in 2015. However, they expanded the people who need to be protected to a wider range, talked about moral responsibilities and insisted on their commitment to the resettlement plan.
The President of the European Parliament David Sassoli publicly opposed the Slovenians on Sunday: “What the EU will do is not determined by the chairman of the council,” said the Italian, who is also a Social Democrat himself. Obviously, “We must show solidarity now.” During a visit to the local EU worker reception center in Afghanistan in Spain, the chairman of the committee Ursula von der Lein asked the international community to “provide a legal and safe route for those in need of protection” on a global scale. “It is very important to resettle vulnerable groups. This is our moral responsibility.” She also named reporters and human rights defenders who were “imminent”. This is the central task of the G7 conversion meeting on Tuesday, and von der Lein will attend the meeting.
Slovenia opposes the Conference of Ministers of the Interior
The EU hopes to fly 230 people from Kabul during Monday, including local workers and their families. They were first taken to an air base near Madrid and distributed from there. In Brussels, it is said that almost all member states have provided a total of 400 places, including Slovenia, but not Hungary and Austria. Member states will have to make recommendations on expanding the groups in need of protection. As reported by officials and diplomats, the President of the Slovenian Council opposed the Conference of Interior Ministers, as suggested by Horst Seehofer (CSU), the head of the German department. Last week, Slovenians restricted video conferencing to the border with Belarus, which caused dissatisfaction in some states and committees.
This is one of the reasons why the committee now uses another tool, the so-called “blueprint network,” a self-managed coordination and information exchange committee. However, it only meets at the official level. The responsible Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson last week called on states to provide more places for the resettlement of Afghans. Women and girls are particularly in “particularly dangerous situations”. At the same time, she made it clear that the EU must prevent people from reaching Europe through unsafe and irregular routes controlled by smugglers.
In Austria, the Christian Democratic Prime Minister’s ÖVP’s position that it does not accept any additional Afghan refugees is putting pressure on the smaller coalition partners in the “turquoise green” government. The green leadership in Vienna clearly stated their opposite position in a statement issued by the Austrian News Agency on Monday, but did not question their involvement in the government. They are in favor of the “European Initiative for Humanitarian Admission of Refugees.” Austria must provide the necessary resources for this.
ÖVP politicians criticize Brussels
The resignation of the former chairman of the Vienna Green Party, who negotiated the Turquoise Green Alliance agreement in 2019, is a testament to the pressure within the party. This actually embodies the principle that ÖVP can take a strong stand against immigrants. In a summer interview over the weekend, Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz confirmed his view that Austria should not “accept more people” and that “this will not happen during my term as prime minister.”
At the same time, ÖVP politicians severely criticized the European Commission’s call to admit Afghan refugees, and the EU hopes to provide additional financial assistance for this. Austrian Minister of the Interior Karl Nehammer said he was “shocked” by the “continuous misinformation” of the committee. Bringing “tens of thousands” of Afghans to Europe is not a solution, but a “very short-sighted and ideologically misguided policy” that is dangerous for Europe. Nehammer and Kurz found that Afghan asylum seekers are “particularly difficult” to integrate. In July, four Afghans were suspected of raping and killing a young man in Vienna, which sparked a heated domestic political debate, some of whom had previously committed criminal offences. ÖVP also pointed out that in European comparisons, since 2015, Austria has only been surpassed by Sweden in terms of the number of asylum-seekers admitted.
