Isn’t that called une grande volte-face, Monsieur Barnier?
He says non-EU migration to France must stop... guess what? He wants to be elected
MICHEL Barnier has called for France to suspend all immigration from outside the European Union for up to five years because the bloc’s borders are not strong enough.
It is an extraordinary volteface for the former EU chief Brexit negotiator, who refused to budge on the issue of freedom of movement within the EU over years of talks and repeatedly criticised Britain for wanting to take back control of its borders.
Aged 70, the Frenchman is seeking to run in next year’s presidential election for the centre-Right party Les Republicains, for whom he served as a minister in the 2000s.
Currently most polls suggest it will be a two-horse race between President Emmanuel Macron, 43, and the far-Right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, 52.
Mr Barnier yesterday admitted French voters are ‘angry’ about the number of migrants arriving into the country.
He argued a moratorium was needed until countries such as Greece and Italy put in place ‘stricter’ checks.
‘The problems of immigration are not moderate,’ he told France 2 TV. ‘I think we have to take the time for three or five years to suspend immigration.’
At the weekend he suggested mass migration had allowed terrorists into France. ‘There are links between [ immigration flows] and terrorist networks which try to infiltrate them,’ he said. Mr Barnier, who served as foreign minister from 2004 to 2005, said yesterday students and refugees would be exempt from his proposed crackdown, but he insisted the EU’s Schengen border- free travel zone needed to be reformed.
‘We have to discuss Schengen with our neighbours, we have to apply controls on borders, we need to be more rigorous.’
The Schengen travel area has grown dramatically since its inception 26 years ago to include 26 countries with a single external border.
The present-day zone covers all the EU member states – except Ireland, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia – as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which are all outside the bloc.
At least one of the suicide bombers involved in the 2015 attacks in Paris arrived in France after posing as a Syrian refugee in a Greek camp at the
‘Dreadful bunch of careerists’
height of the migration crisis. The EU has refused to consider scrapping Schengen, which it has repeatedly praised as ‘the greatest achievement of European integration’.
In a speech a year after Britain’s vote to leave the EU, Mr Barnier spoke of the ‘four indivisible freedoms’ of the single market, which included the free movement of people.
Last night former Ukip leader Nigel Farage tweeted: ‘ My agenda looks moderate compared to the new Barnier. What a dreadful bunch of careerists they all are.’