The European Parliament has passed an anti-migrant returns bill, a piece of legislation designed to accelerate the forced removal of irregular migrants who have had their asylum applications rejected. The vote was accompanied by scenes that would have seemed extraordinary in any previous European Parliament: MEPs chanting “send them back” from the chamber floor, a phrase until recently associated exclusively with the far-right street movements the European establishment spent two decades trying to contain. The bill passed with a coalition that required votes from mainstream centre-right parties alongside the hard-right groupings that have grown across the continent. The legal mechanism is the returns directive — tightening procedures, extending detention periods, restricting appeals — but the political meaning extends well beyond any specific legislative instrument. Europe’s political centre has concluded that it cannot outbid the far right on migration by talking about values. It has decided instead to try outbidding it on policy.
The received wisdom
The progressive case against this legislation is coherent and deserves an honest hearing. The argument runs as follows: returns policies are largely symbolic because most countries of origin refuse to accept forcibly returned migrants, making the headline target of rapid removal practically unachievable. Detention extensions harm the most vulnerable — families, unaccompanied minors, torture survivors — without deterring future migration, because the drivers of migration (war, climate, economic desperation) are unaffected by European detention periods. And, most damagingly, legitimising the “send them back” language in the chamber of a democratic institution normalises dehumanising rhetoric that has historically preceded worse. The path from a parliamentary chant to state-sanctioned violence against minorities is not inevitable, but European history teaches that it is not as long as comfortable liberals like to believe.
On this reading, the mainstream centre-right’s willingness to vote alongside hard-right groupings is not strategic triangulation but a moral capitulation — one that degrades democratic norms while failing to solve the underlying policy problem, since the hard-right will simply move the goalposts to demand the next, more extreme measure.
A different read
The received wisdom is not wrong on the details of enforcement impracticality or on the dangers of normalising hard-right rhetoric. Where it fails is in its account of how Europe arrived at this moment — and that failure matters because it determines whether you think the centre-right’s strategy is a sell-out or a rational response to a political trap of the left’s own construction.
The trap was built over more than a decade. From 2015’s migration wave through the subsequent years of slow-moving asylum systems, failed integration programmes, and persistent public anxiety about security and cultural change, the mainstream European centre-left and centre-right consistently chose a form of managerial euphemism over plain-spoken engagement. The numbers, the costs, the strains on housing and public services, the genuine complexities of integrating large populations with different cultural starting points — all of these were either minimised or, worse, treated as symptoms of racism among the concerned rather than as legitimate policy questions deserving serious answers.
The result was predictable in retrospect. Voters who had genuine concerns and felt those concerns dismissed did not stop having them. They found parties willing to name what the mainstream would not, and they voted for those parties in growing numbers. By 2024-2025, far-right or hard-right parties had either entered government or become the largest opposition in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, and Finland. The political realignment is now structural, not cyclical.
The centre-right’s response — incorporating harder migration language and tighter enforcement into mainstream European law — is an attempt to defuse that realignment by showing that democratic institutions can respond to the migration question. This is not a new strategy; it is what centre-right parties from Nicolas Sarkozy’s France to David Cameron’s Britain attempted before it. The historical record is mixed. When it works, it can stabilise the political centre by demonstrating that the system is responsive. When it fails — when the promised enforcement does not materialise or the policy is tied up in courts — it tends to accelerate the far right’s momentum by confirming that the mainstream cannot be trusted even on its own terms.
The specific bill before the Parliament is unlikely to produce a dramatic change in removal rates, for the practical reasons the progressives identify. But the political test is different from the operational one. The centre-right needs to demonstrate to its own voters that it is serious, not that it has immediately fixed a decades-old problem. If the legislation is challenged in courts and stripped of its enforcement mechanisms, the political damage will be severe. If it produces even modest, visible progress on removals, it may buy the mainstream parties enough credibility to hold the centre through the next electoral cycle.
The chanting is still ugly. Normalising that specific language in the Parliament is a cost, and it is a real one. But the counterfactual — continuing to lose ground to parties that are explicitly anti-democratic in their longer-term ambitions — carries its own costs. The question for European liberals is not whether they prefer the world without these compromises, but what world they are actually choosing between.
What to watch
Watch the legal challenges: advocacy organisations and several member state governments have already signalled they will challenge key provisions of the returns bill before the European Court of Justice, and the outcome there will determine whether the legislation has practical teeth. Watch Germany specifically — with the CDU now in government and under pressure from the AfD on its right, Berlin’s implementation approach will set the political tone for the continent. Watch also whether the bill becomes a template for further legislation or a one-time concession: the hard-right’s pattern is to accept small wins as a down payment on larger demands. Finally, watch whether the progressive parties find a coherent policy alternative, rather than simply opposing enforcement — the absence of a credible counter-proposal has been their political weakness for a decade, and it remains so.
— J