Build that wall, Greek leader says ahead of election

ATHENS — Greek voters will decide Sunday whether to harden the country’s line on migration by extending a border wall with Turkey, or elect the left-wing opposition Syriza party which has adopted a softer stance on the issue.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to lengthen the fence to cover almost the entire length of Greece’s 192 kilometer border with Turkey by 2026. He also wants the EU to provide the funding, arguing that Greece alone should not bear the cost of protecting the bloc’s most problematic border.

And if the pledge to build a wall and make someone else pay for it sounds familiar, Mitsotakis rejects the comparison with Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidency in 2016 with a slogan to do something very similar with Mexico.

“I don’t have thick blond hair, so I think the comparison is not particularly relevant,” Mitsotakis said in an interview last month with German newspaper Bild, published in English on the prime minister’s website.

He said the work was necessary to avoid another “organized invasion of illegal migrants into Greek, that means European, territory” — referring to an influx of migrants across the Turkish border in early 2020 after an EU-Turkey deal to control the flow of people broke down.

Greeks go to the polls on Sunday, May 21, in an election marked by public anger over a deadly train crash and an unpredictable new cohort of young voters. Mitsotakis’s New Democracy party leads in the polls with around 36 percent, but is likely to fall short of a clear majority. Syriza is running in second with 29 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.

Mitsotakis has called on Syriza to take a clear stance on the extension of the fence. “Will it tear down the fence by returning to open-border logic? There is no room for half-truths here,” he said during a recent visit to Evros, the province bordering Turkey.

Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras has said that the existing section of fence was already in place when he became prime minister in 2015, and he didn’t knock it down during four years in office. But extending it is not a magic solution, he said.

“The migration/refugee issue is much more complicated and if it could be solved with fences, Greece and Europe and the U.S. would have dealt with it. Trump was saying the same in Mexico, ‘the fence will save us.’ You can’t be saved by fences,” he told local Skai TV earlier this month.

The socialist Pasok party, polling in third place at around 10 percent, supports the extension of the fence. “Pasok initiated the construction of the fence, because for us both Evros and the sea have borders and must be guarded,” spokesman Dimitris Mantzos said.

Pushback policy

Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s migration crisis since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people from Syria and elsewhere began entering the EU hoping to claim asylum. Many went through Turkey, either crossing the land border into Greece or making the perilous sea crossing to its Aegean islands.

An initial wave of public sympathy and an open-doors policy from many governments, including Germany, was soon replaced by a tougher line as the difficulty of vetting migrants’ refugee status and integrating them into European society became clear. The EU began taking measures to control its borders, including signing a deal with Turkey in 2016. But Turkey proved an unreliable partner — and may well continue to be, if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can best his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in this month’s election runoff.

Human rights organizations and the European Parliament have accused the Greek government of illegal “pushbacks” — forcing back migrants who have made it into Greek territory — and of deporting migrants without due process. Greece’s government denies those accusations, arguing that independent investigations by Greek authorities haven’t found any proof.

“We have followed a strict but fair policy, we have protected our land and sea borders, proving that the sea has borders and we can guard them. We have reduced flows by 90 percent,” Mitsotakis said on a recent visit to the Aegean island of Lesbos.

Gerald Knaus, an Austrian migration expert who led work on the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, said both methods were in play. “Clearly some walls stopped or dramatically reduced flows, but in combination with pushbacks,” he said. “In Greece’s case specifically, you can’t build the wall at the sea, where you have large numbers of arrivals.”

Who will pay for it?

The question of whether the EU should pay for member countries’ border fences is a controversial one. While the migration crisis has stabilized since 2015, it remains a live issue — and that’s unlikely to change given the realities of climate change, war and hunger in the Middle East and Africa.

EU leaders in February pledged “significant” funds to bolster cameras and personnel at the frontiers, but stopped short of directly funding wall-building. A similar proposal was passed in the European Parliament in April, to the dismay of left-wing lawmakers. The possibility of EU-funded walls, once unthinkable, has entered the realm of the possible.

Knaus said it was “dishonest” to reject wall-building, which is legal, while allowing pushbacks, which are not. “By saying we don’t fund the fence, but we ignore violations of the rule of law, the [European] Commission is taking a very easy way out, as symbolic measure that has no real impact,” he said.

For Mitsotakis, it’s only fair that a collective benefit should be paid for by collective funding. “We are a frontline state, we are subject to significant migratory pressures, we expect help from the EU,” he said in the Bild interview. “It’s very unfair on the one hand, to ask Greece to do the difficult job of protecting the external borders and then pointing the finger at Greece because it’s simply doing the job on behalf of others.”

If he wins the election and the EU chooses not to fund the wall, Greece will go it alone, Mitsotakis said at a campaign rally: “The fence in Evros will be finished with or without European money.”