How migration became the most reliable engine of European populism - the pressure on frontline states, the deals with third countries, and the issue that reshapes elections across the continent

Main Analysis

If one wanted to identify the single issue that has done most to reshape European politics over the past decade, the answer would not be the economy, or the climate, or even the war in Ukraine. It would be migration. No other issue has so consistently fuelled the rise of populist and nationalist movements, so reliably reshaped party systems and brought down governments, or so directly challenged the foundations of the European project. Migration is the engine of European populism - the issue that, more than any other, has powered the political transformation of the continent.

This week’s Power Map examined the machinery Europe has built to manage migration - the Dublin system, Frontex, the Pact on Migration and Asylum. This Review examines the politics that migration generates: why it has proven so potent a force, how it has reshaped the political landscape, the pressure it places on the frontline states that bear its brunt, the controversial deals Europe has struck to control it, and what its enduring political power means for the future of the Union.

The central fact to grasp is that migration’s political power is out of proportion to its measurable scale. The numbers of arrivals, while significant, do not by themselves explain the scale of the political reaction. Migration touches something deeper - anxieties about identity, security, culture, and control that give it a political potency far beyond what the statistics would predict. Understanding this gap between the scale of migration and the scale of its political effect is essential to understanding contemporary European politics.

Migration has been the most reliable source of energy for the populist and nationalist movements that have transformed European politics, and the relationship between the two is worth examining directly.

Across Europe, the parties that have risen most dramatically over the past decade have made opposition to immigration central to their appeal. From France to Italy, from the Netherlands to Germany, from Scandinavia to Central Europe, movements that were once marginal have become major forces - in several cases entering government - substantially on the strength of their stance on migration. The issue has provided these movements with a cause that mobilises voters, a grievance that resonates across class lines, and a wedge that divides the traditional parties they have displaced.

The potency of migration as a political issue derives from its capacity to fuse several anxieties into a single cause. It connects economic insecurity - the fear of competition for jobs, housing, and public services - with cultural anxiety about identity and social change, with concerns about security and crime, and with a broader sense that elites have lost control of the borders and imposed change without consent. This fusion gives migration a reach across the electorate that few other issues achieve, and it allows populist movements to assemble coalitions that cut across traditional political divisions.

The established parties have struggled to respond. Some have tried to neutralise the issue by adopting tougher positions on migration, often alienating their own supporters without winning over the populists’ voters. Others have defended more open positions and paid an electoral price. The issue has destabilised party systems across Europe, and the established parties have found no reliable answer to the populist challenge that migration has powered. The transformation of European politics over the past decade is, to a substantial degree, the story of how migration broke the old party systems and empowered new forces.

The political pressure of migration falls most heavily on the frontline states - the southern and eastern members where most arrivals first reach Europe - and their experience reveals the human and political reality behind the policy debates.

Italy and Greece, in particular, have borne an enormous share of Mediterranean arrivals, and the strain has reshaped their politics profoundly. The sense of being abandoned by the rest of Europe - left to cope with a burden that is supposedly a common European responsibility - has fed resentment and fuelled the populist movements that have risen in these countries. The frontline states have experienced migration not as an abstract policy question but as a concrete and overwhelming reality, and their politics have been transformed accordingly.

The rise of Giorgia Meloni to the Italian premiership - profiled in this weekend’s Power Figures - is the clearest expression of how migration reshapes frontline politics. Meloni led a party that placed opposition to uncontrolled migration at the centre of its appeal, and her rise to power reflected, in substantial part, Italian frustration with a migration burden that Italians felt the rest of Europe had left them to bear alone. The frontline states’ experience of migration has produced some of the most significant political shifts in contemporary Europe, and Italy is the foremost example.

The frontline states’ predicament also explains their behaviour within the Union. Their demand for solidarity, their resistance to the Dublin rules, their occasional willingness to act unilaterally or to let arrivals move onward to other member states - all reflect the impossible position in which geography and European rules have placed them. They bear a burden they did not choose and cannot manage alone, and the failure of the rest of the Union to share it adequately has shaped both their politics and their conduct within the European system.

The Politics of Migration - Key Points

Political effect: the most reliable engine of European populism and nationalism
Mechanism: fuses economic, cultural, security, and control anxieties into one cause
Effect on party systems: destabilised traditional parties across Europe
Frontline pressure: Italy and Greece bear disproportionate Mediterranean arrivals
Italian example: Meloni’s rise reflects frontline frustration with migration
External dimension: controversial deals with third countries to stem the flow

One of the most significant and controversial dimensions of European migration policy is the set of arrangements Europe has struck with countries outside its borders to prevent migrants from reaching Europe in the first place - externalising migration control to third countries.

The model was established most prominently in an arrangement with Turkey, under which Turkey agreed to prevent migrants from crossing to Europe in exchange for financial support and other concessions. The arrangement dramatically reduced arrivals along that route and became a template for subsequent deals with other transit and origin countries across North Africa and beyond. Europe has, in effect, paid and pressured neighbouring states to act as a buffer, stopping migrants before they reach European soil.

These arrangements are effective at reducing arrivals, which is why Europe has pursued them, but they are deeply controversial. They involve cooperation with governments whose human rights records are poor and whose treatment of the migrants they detain on Europe’s behalf is often abusive. They raise the question of whether Europe is upholding its commitment to human rights and the right to asylum or merely pushing the violation of those rights beyond its own borders, out of sight. And they create dependencies - the partner countries gain leverage over Europe, able to threaten the reopening of the routes they have agreed to close, turning migration into an instrument of pressure against the Union.

The deals with third countries thus embody, in their starkest form, the central tension of European migration policy: the collision between the political demand to control migration and the European commitment to human rights and humanitarian principle. Europe has increasingly resolved this tension in favour of control, accepting moral compromises to achieve the reductions in arrivals that its politics demand. Whether this is a sustainable or defensible approach - and what it means for Europe’s claim to be a community of values - is among the most uncomfortable questions in European policy.

The enduring political power of migration has implications that extend across the European future, and several deserve emphasis.

The first is that migration will continue to shape European elections and governments, and through them the direction of European policy. The populist movements that migration has empowered are now established forces, in government in several member states and influential in many others. Their presence shapes what is politically possible across a range of issues, not only migration itself. The political energy that migration generates has become a permanent feature of the European landscape, and it constrains and shapes European policy in ways that will persist.

The second is that migration will continue to test, and may continue to erode, the European commitment to its founding values. The pressure to control migration pushes against the Union’s commitment to human rights, to asylum, to humanitarian principle. The deals with third countries, the controversies around Frontex, the treatment of arrivals at the border - all reflect a Union increasingly willing to compromise its values under political pressure. How far this erosion goes, and whether Europe can reconcile control with its principles, is a question that bears on the Union’s fundamental character.

The third is that migration will remain a source of division that tests European unity. The conflict between frontline and interior states, between those who emphasise solidarity and those who emphasise sovereignty, between competing national interests and politics, will continue to strain the Union. Migration is the issue on which European solidarity is most severely tested, and the test will recur as long as the pressures that generate migration persist. For a Union whose strength depends on unity, the enduring divisiveness of migration is a persistent vulnerability - and one that its adversaries, internal and external, have every incentive to exploit.

The Mayor on the Front Line

The mayor of a town on a Mediterranean island that has been a primary point of arrival for migrants crossing to Europe has held office through years of the migration crisis. She asks not to be named, nor her town identified, because the subject has become so politically charged that any public statement is seized upon by one side or the other.

“We are a small place,” she says. “A few thousand people. And we have processed, over the years, many times our own population in arrivals. We did not ask for this. We are simply where the boats reach land. Geography made us the front line of a continent.”

She describes a community caught between compassion and exhaustion. “At first there was enormous solidarity. People took migrants into their homes, fed them, cared for the children. We were proud of how we responded. But it never stopped, and the rest of Europe never really came to help, and after years the solidarity wore thin. Not because people became cruel, but because they were exhausted and abandoned.”

Her anger is directed less at the migrants than at the rest of Europe. “The politicians in the northern capitals make speeches about values and solidarity, and then they refuse to take a single person from us. They are generous with their words and absent with their help. We bear the reality while they bear the rhetoric. That is what radicalised this island - not the migrants, but the abandonment.”

She has watched the politics shift. “People here used to vote for the traditional parties. Now many vote for the populists, because the populists are the only ones who seem to acknowledge what we have lived through. I do not always agree with those parties. But I understand exactly why my neighbours turned to them. Europe asked us to carry this alone and then wondered why we grew angry. The answer was always obvious to anyone who lived here.”

The Demography Behind the Politics

Beneath the heated politics of migration lies a demographic reality that the political debate rarely confronts honestly: Europe is ageing, its birth rates are below replacement, and its working-age population is shrinking - which means that, on purely economic grounds, Europe needs immigration even as its politics increasingly rejects it.

The demographic arithmetic is stark. With fewer births and longer lives, Europe faces a future of shrinking workforces supporting growing populations of retirees. The economic consequences - labour shortages, strained pension systems, declining growth - are severe, and one of the few available remedies is immigration to replenish the working-age population. Many of the sectors that keep European economies and societies functioning, from healthcare to agriculture to construction, already depend heavily on immigrant labour, and that dependence will only grow as the native population ages.

This creates a profound and largely unacknowledged contradiction at the heart of European migration politics. The politics increasingly demand the reduction of immigration, driven by the cultural and security anxieties that populist movements have mobilised. The economics increasingly require the maintenance or expansion of immigration, driven by demographic decline. Europe is caught between a politics that rejects immigration and an economy that needs it - and the gap between the two is rarely addressed honestly by political leaders, who find it easier to ride the political energy against migration than to make the economic case for it.

How Europe resolves this contradiction - whether it finds a way to reconcile the immigration its economy needs with the politics its electorate demands, or whether it sacrifices economic need to political pressure - is one of the defining challenges of its future. The politics of the border, for all its heat and energy, runs up against a demographic reality that no amount of political mobilisation can wish away. The continent that increasingly wants to close its doors is the same continent that, by the cold logic of its demography, cannot afford to.

Migration has become the most powerful force in European politics - the engine of populism, the test of solidarity, the issue that reshapes elections and erodes values - and its potency derives not from its scale but from its capacity to fuse every anxiety of a changing continent into a single cause that no established party has learned to answer.