A Migration Enforcer Europe Can Accept
PIRAEUS, Greece — Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece has been accused of illegally pushing asylum seekers back at sea. He has acknowledged that the state’s intelligence service wiretapped an opposition leader. He has consolidated media control as press freedom in Greece has dropped to the lowest in Europe. It is the sort of thing that the guardians of European Union values often scorn in right-wing populist leaders, like Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Viktor Orban of Hungary.
But as Greece held national elections on Sunday, Brussels instead lauded Mr. Mitsotakis, a pro-Europe conservative, for bringing stability to the Greek economy, for sending military aid to Ukraine and for providing regional stability in a time of potential upheaval in Turkey. Above all, European Union leaders appear to have given Mr. Mitsotakis leeway for doing the continent’s unpleasant work on migrants, showing just how much Europe has shifted, with crackdowns formerly associated with the right wing drifting into the mainstream.
“I’m helping Europe on numerous fronts,” Mr. Mitsotakis, 55, said on May 16 in the port city of Piraeus, where he rallied voters. “It’s bought us reasonable good will.”
Mr. Mitsotakis argued that after the arrival of over a million migrants and asylum seekers destabilized the continent’s politics by entering through Greece during the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016, Europe had come around to Greece’s tougher approach. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, has called Greece’s border enforcement Europe’s “shield.”
“We’ve been able to sort of change, I think, the European approach vis-à-vis migration,” said Mr. Mitsotakis, a selfdescribed progressive who leads the nominally centerright New Democracy party. “Right-wing or a central policy, I don’t know what it is, but I have to protect my borders.”
In turn, Europe seems to have protected Mr. Mitsotakis.
Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Union law at the HEC Paris business school, said Mr. Mitsotakis’s special treatment has derived from his closeness to Ms. von der Leyen and his willingness to build — with funding from the bloc — a vast network of migrant centers that have proved politically popular in Greece.
“We’re no longer sort of the poster child for problems in Europe,” Mr. Mitsotakis said.
He and his party won Sunday’s vote decisively while falling short of the majority required to lead a one-party government, setting the stage for another ballot within weeks since he appeared to rule out forming a governing coalition.
The day after the election, the European Commission announced that it had formally asked Greece to begin an investigation into a New York Times report based on footage showing the country’s Coast Guard abandoning migrants in the Aegean Sea last month.
Before the election, Greeks talked about how Mr. Mitsotakis had made the islands that were once overrun with migrants livable again, how he had been the first Greek prime minister invited to speak to a joint session of Congress in Washington, and how he had stood up to Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They appreciated how he had cut taxes and debt and increased digitization, minimum wages and pensions.
Greece’s 2010 debt crisis nearly sank the European Union. Humiliating bailouts followed, and a decade of stark austerity policies — directed by Germany — cut pensions and public services, shrank economic output, inflated unemployment and prompted thousands of Greeks to flee.
In 2015, under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras of the leftwing Syriza party, Greeks voted to reject Europe’s aid package with its many conditions, and the country was nearly ejected from the eurozone. Social unrest and talk of “Grexit” mounted, but Mr. Tsipras eventually carried out the required overhauls and moderated in the following years, arguing that Greece had started on the road to recovery.
But in 2019 he lost to Mr. Mitsotakis — the son of a former prime minister, trained at the elite American universities Harvard and Stanford — who seemed the personification of the establishment. He promised to right the Greek ship.
“This was always my bet,” Mr. Mitsotakis said. “And I think that we delivered.”
Greece’s leader is getting leeway for his hard line.