Marc Martorell Junyent is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared in Responsible Statecraft, The New Arab, Jacobin and other publications. He tweets at @MarcMartorell3.
Across the Middle East and North Africa, 16.6 million people remain forcibly displaced or stateless. The minority that continues their journey to Europe in search of a better life suffers from an increasingly hostile climate. In the Netherlands, for instance, the national government collapsed in early June over the far-right Party for Freedom's (PVV) demands on migration policy, which included deploying the army to the border and forcibly returning all Syrian refugees.
But it is two other Central European countries that recently celebrated elections—Germany and Poland—that showcase how the right to asylum is under worsening assault.
In Germany, the center-right Christian Democratic Union and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), won parliamentary elections in February 2025. In May, CDU leader Friedrich Merz became chancellor, heading a government with the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The elections witnessed a record-high result for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which gathered 21% of the votes. Both the AfD and some members of the CDU/CSU called for the mass deportation of Syrian refugees.
Meanwhile, the right-wing populist Karol Nawrocki achieved a narrow victory in the second round of the Polish presidential elections over the center-right candidate Rafał Trzaskowski in June 2025. Nawrocki, supported by the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, is expected to use his veto power against Prime Minister Donald Tusk liberal-conservative Civic Platform government, a political ally of Trzaskowski. Both Trzaskowski and Nawrocki used anti-migrant rhetoric against Middle Eastern and Ukrainian refugees in their quest to win the election.
Both Germany and Poland's center-right candidates hardened their rhetoric and policies on migrants and asylum-seekers, only to lose more ground to right-wing candidates. On the campaign trail, Merz promised to immediately increase pre-existing border checks and turn away all irregular migrants at the border—including asylum seekers.
- Marc Martorell Junyent
The topics that decided the elections were manifold. Yet, both Germany and Poland's center-right candidates hardened their rhetoric and policies on migrants and asylum-seekers, only to lose more ground to right-wing candidates. On the campaign trail, Merz promised to immediately increase pre-existing border checks and turn away all irregular migrants at the border—including asylum seekers.
His party began the election campaign with a 15-point margin over the AfD, but landed less than eight points ahead of the far-right on election night, again proving that the center-right tends to lose when adopting the topics and language of the far-right.
The Merz-led government subsequently suspended family reunification for two years for people with subsidiary protection living in Germany. This measure, mainly affecting Syrians, will separate nuclear families in Germany and their home countries. Human rights organizations remark that family reunification is a key step towards integration. In parallel, the German government hopes to widen the list of so-called "safe countries" to accelerate deportations.
Most media attention, however, has focused on intensified border controls. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt ordered the police to refuse entry to 330 asylum-seekers during the first two months of intensified border controls, reportedly making exceptions for children and vulnerable people. A Berlin court examining the case of three Somalis rejected at the border declared in early June that the pushbacks were unlawful. Yet, Dobrindt moved ahead.
Marcus Engler, a researcher at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), argues that the border controls are "highly symbolic." At the same time, he notes, "People are very difficult to stop, even if you are willing to use violence, because there are many factors, such as family ties or the economic situation in Germany, that bring people to the country."
In Poland, Trzaskowski expressed his support for the Tusk government's decision in February 2025 to suspend the right to asylum along Poland's border with Belarus. Warsaw defended its position to the European Commission—which largely accepted the argument—by noting that the Belarusian government is using migrants as a "hybrid threat" against the EU's external borders.
The most common nationalities among Middle Eastern citizens applying for asylum in Poland are Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan. There is evidence that the Belarusian government facilitates the arrival of Middle Eastern migrants at the Polish border. However, this is not a valid legal argument to deny asylum rights to those who qualify.
Independent human rights organizations have recorded 89 deaths at the border since 2021, with many migrants trapped in the Białowieża Forest between Poland and Belarus after multiple pushbacks. Polish authorities actively restrict access for journalists and human rights activists in the area.
With the assault on the right to asylum advancing in Central Europe, humanitarian organizations and asylum defenders find themselves on the backfoot. Anti-refugee policies established amid the 2015 migrant crisis, stemming from brutal Middle East conflicts, are expanding into broader anti-migrant and anti-democratic practices.
- Marc Martorell Junyent
Agnieszka Kosowicz, the founder of the Polish Migration Forum Foundation, explains that the suspension of the right to asylum in Poland "has not changed much."
"Even before the right to asylum was suspended, it was not respected at the Polish-Belarusian border, and it is still not," she adds. Activists "continue reporting cases of vulnerable persons, including minors or victims of torture, whose asylum claims are not processed, and they are simply pushed back."
Whereas Germany can claim to process more asylum requests per 100,000 people than the EU average (2.8 in Germany as compared to an average of 2 across the EU), Poland processed only 0.4 requests per 100,000 people in 2024. For comparison, a country like Jordan hosts 8,900 refugees per 100,000 people.
In 2015, when the attitudes towards refugees were still more welcoming in Germany, the PiS government in Poland was spreading Islamophobic and anti-refugee messages with the help of the public media it controlled. Ahead of the recent elections, almost all candidates played the anti-migrant card, Kosowicz criticizes. She adds: "This is unfortunate, considering that Poland has become a country of immigration over the last three years, hosting nearly one million refugees from Ukraine, and almost two million migrants of various nationalities."
Non-European migrants and asylum seekers, often Orientalized in the popular imagination as threatening Middle Eastern and Muslim men, have long been demonized in Germany and Poland. The recent elections in both countries, however, saw a new phenomenon, as Ukrainians have also progressively become the target of anti-refugee rhetoric and policies. Whereas German and Polish leaders continue to laud Ukraine's military resistance against the Russian invasion and promise more weapons for the embattled country, Ukrainian refugees are meeting a new harshness.
Merz once spoke about Ukrainian refugees as engaged in "social tourism" because they supposedly move back and forth between Ukraine and Germany. Now, as chancellor, he is leading a government that plans to reduce social provisions for Ukrainian refugees who arrived in Germany after April 2025, including Bürgergeld, or the "citizen's benefit."
In Poland, both the Trzaskowski and Nawrocki campaigns promised to limit child benefit payments to Ukrainian parents working and paying taxes in Poland. The child benefits payments, around €200 ($235) a month per child, are typically paid to all parents in the country, constituting the only welfare payments Ukrainians receive from the Polish state.
Human rights activists in Poland and Germany who oppose such measures face increasingly poor treatment. In Poland, the case of the "Hajnowka 5" is noteworthy. In Hajnowka, a town close to the Polish-Belarusian border, a local court is prosecuting five activists for providing "illegal assistance" to refugees. In March 2022, the five defendants provided water, food and clothing to an Iraqi couple crossing the border with their seven children and an elderly Egyptian they met on the way. Driving the group to the nearest town, they were intercepted by patrol agents and now face up to five years in prison for their humanitarian actions.
Germany has not experienced the criminalization of human rights activism at this level, but there are concerning signs. Pro Asyl, a German NGO that provided legal help in the case of the three Somalis, received attacks from German conservatives in the government. A CSU politician accused Pro Asyl of organizing a "setup" with the three Somali asylum-seekers. Another CDU colleague argued that the NGO had assisted them in crossing the border, among other possible "illegal actions." Pro Asyl has denied both accusations: "We help refugees to assert their rights—when German authorities knowingly break the law."
With the assault on the right to asylum advancing in Central Europe, humanitarian organizations and asylum defenders find themselves on the backfoot. Anti-refugee policies established amid the 2015 migrant crisis, stemming from brutal Middle East conflicts, are expanding into broader anti-migrant and anti-democratic practices.
As Ukrainian refugees experience a previously unknown harshness, questions arise on whether solidarity with one specific group of white, Western refugees can be sustainable in the long run. Instead of improving the conditions for non-Ukrainian refugees to the level of their Ukrainian counterparts, Poland and Germany are downgrading the rights of both. While basic humanity and equal human rights considerations must reign supreme, Europe's leaders are bargaining away such basic principles in the name of political power today.
