It’s the latest in a series of laws aimed at streamlining and firming up EU migration rules following the 2024 EU election, which delivered a shift to the right. That includes a push to boost deportations and to allow countries to deport migrants to non-EU countries that aren’t the person’s country of origin.
Swedish lawmaker Charlie Weimers, lead negotiator for the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists group, said the compromise resulted from negotiations it held with the center-right European People’s Party and the far-right Patriots and Europe of Sovereign Nations groups.
“Now we see this cooperation taking form over time in different negotiations, we can accept that we have a stable majority on the center-right on migration issues,” Weimers said.
The lead negotiator on the law, Dutch liberal MEP Malik Azmani, had tried to find a compromise within the centrist coalition that gave Commission President Ursula von der Leyen a second term (the EPP, the liberals of Renew Europe, and the center-left Socialists and Democrats).
But on Wednesday evening Azmani halted negotiations and sent a compromise proposal to all political groups, igniting fury on the left and right. A Greens official referred to Azmani’s handling of the issue as “chaotic.”
“Half of the text, we didn’t really negotiate it,” said the Patriots’ lead negotiator, Marieke Ehlers. “In the end, he [Azmani] presented his own ‘compromise’ that is not good enough for those on the right, but I would wager that it’s also not good enough for S&D.”