Migration pact will fail if EU funding falls short, Spanish minister warns

Though some countries have recently expressed opposition to the freshly passed EU migration pact, it is insufficient EU cash and not member states’ hesitance that could make the implementation fall apart, Spain’s Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, told Euractiv in an interview.

Grande-Marlaska’s comments came ahead of an interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg on 13 June, when the Commission presented the Asylum and Migration Pact implementation plan to member states after EU institutions rubberstamped the deal in the spring.

During a press conference the day before, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, in charge of the file, stated that the EU will make available €3.6 billion to co-fund the implementation, though an important chunk of the money will also need to come from national budgets, she said.

But Grande-Marlaska is not convinced.

“I could tell you that those [funds] are very few or that those are enough, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” he said, though affirming: “If there is no real funding to make it effective, then the migration pact could fall apart.”

The pact’s implementation is a labyrinth of 10 intertwined building blocks that will require member states to invest heavily in new infrastructure and staff to coordinate incoming migration flows from the EU’s borders to resettlement and integration, as well as returns.

In the case of southern countries, which will need to invest in physical infrastructure and staff to ensure the smooth functioning of the border procedures established by the pact, he argued that “funding should come mainly from the European Union.”

“Funding must correspond to objective needs” of each country, he added, highlighting that in Spain “the most important challenge will undoubtedly be border procedures,” as all the other building blocks of the pact have already been, to a certain extent, implemented in the country in these last years, according to the minister.

‘Don’t worry: EU countries will not backtrack’

The Asylum and Migration Pact results from intense negotiations between the 27 member states and the European Parliament’s political groups.

As a result, it is an “agreement of minimum” which nobody is fully happy about, Grande-Marlaska, who has been Interior minister for the last six years and involved in all negotiations, accepted.

“I think we are all [ministers] reasonably satisfied, not euphoric, because it is not the pact that each of the 27 member states would have liked, but it has been approved by a vast majority and that is very important,” he said, adding that “it would have been really frustrating and a failure not to get that lowest common denominator.”

The agreement follows other attempts to establish a coherent European migration strategy, which have failed due to countries’ lack of commitment.

In the case of the pact, Hungary and Poland ultimately voted against it and voiced opposition in recent weeks.

In Hungary’s case, the EU Court of Justice slapped the country on Thursday with a €200 million fine for ignoring EU asylum rules — with an extra million per day to be paid until the rules are complied with.

In addition, the Netherlands’ newly elected right-wing government expressed in May that they would seek an opt-out from the pact as a whole to implement harsher national asylum and migration rules instead.

Meanwhile, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, and Poland sent a letter to the Commission on 7 June asking to widen possibilities for member states to “temporarily derogate from EU law based on national security,” proposing a potential change to parts of the migration pact and border management – it does not apply to asylum procedures.

“We call the future European Commission for legislative initiatives that allow for the use of sufficiently broad national security derogations in situations of border security, including instrumentalised migration,” the letter reads.

The pact’s complex implementation leaves it at risk of failing if not all the building blocks are carefully adopted by all member states.

“You cannot pick and choose, all the 10 building blocs have to be implemented. If you take one out, it will all fall down,” Johansson said on Tuesday, adding the Commission will do “whatever it takes” to make the pact “a tangible success.”

Echoing Johansson, who Grande-Marlaska said is the “paradigm of effectiveness,” he affirmed being “absolutely convinced” that, by the time the implementation deadline of  June 2026 comes, when all counties need to have their systems up and running,  “we are all going to be prepared.”

“Don’t worry, it will be applied,” he assured.

Despite “no shouts of joy” when the agreement was passed, Grande-Marlaska affirmed that all EU countries will fully implement the pact as the increasing and harsher reality of migration flows makes it a shared interest to take the implementation seriously.

“We now have two years to implement the pact, let’s let the pact live, let’s implement it, and I think it is too early to talk about reforms,” he said, acting to calls by some lawmakers to tweak some parts of the files – especially on returns.

EU countries will need to submit the first draft of their national implementation plan by October 2024 to have the Commission review it. The final version is due December 2024.

The instruments that constitute the Pact on Migration and Asylum will become applicable as of mid-2026.

[Edited by Alice Taylor / Aurélie Pugnet]

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