by Nick O’Connell
EU Political Analysis

7 November 2019

The latest Greek elections were overwhelmingly influenced by the humanitarian crisis that has set the country in turmoil since 2015. In that year alone, over 800,000 refugees reached Greece’s shores.

The crisis hurt the center-left government and then Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who was also negotiating the country’s bankruptcy at this volatile time. The right’s harder stance on immigration rewarded the conservative New Democracy party in June’s election, and they now rule the country.

The newly formed government just last Friday followed up on their anti-migrants electoral promises.

The Greek parliament passed a controversial piece of legislation that toughens the country’s asylum policy, a new mechanism set up to facilitate the deportation of failed asylum seekers in an expedited and arguably reckless manner. The promotors of the law say that it will shorten asylum requests and speed up the country’s broken migratory system.

But the bill in fact reduces safeguards for people seeking international protection. It will compromise refugees’ right of appeal and endanger the asylum procedures of unaccompanied minors.

Greece’s broken immigration system however is only a symptom of a much larger Union-wide problem.

To blame Greek policymakers in isolation would miss the point. This because the bill is a direct reaction to the Union-wide failed migratory system that forces Mediterranean countries of first reception to process every refugee’s asylum request. When tens of thousands of migrants reach Europe’s shores every year, this is a burden single country’s cannot sustain on their own.

Nonetheless, thousands still live in precarious conditions throughout Greece, awaiting for their asylum request to go through when they’re lucky and to be denied entry or deported in the worst-case scenarios.

At MotM, we remain on the frontline, calling out these political shortcomings, as we did in Foggia a few weeks ago, reporting on the staggeringly inhumane conditions of Gran Ghetto.

MotM Founder and Italy Correspondent, Pamela Kerpius, continues fieldwork across the Italian peninsula to capture even more stories like it. Her visit to Milan and Naples just last week yielded some exceptional encounters. She heard again further stories of frustration towards a system that does not fully recognize migrants, leaving them trapped in a legal deadlock. Unfortunately what she is seeing in Italy is not very different than in Greece.

We know that the only lasting solution to this humanitarian crisis is reforming the European Union asylum mechanism to evenly redistribute migrants once they reach the continent’s shores and to lift the burden Mediterranean countries have had to sustain for too long.

Until then, Migrants of the Mediterranean is dedicated to giving a face and a voice to those on the margins, and to elevate the migration discourse squarely in human terms.