Sánchez and Tusk clash over immigration as Costa plays mediator

Sánchez and Tusk at loggerheads over immigration at the European Council

The latest European Council meeting ended with the President of the Council, Portugal's António Costa, acting as referee. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Pedro Sánchez got into a row over immigration to the point that, according to the Polish press, Tusk left the room and Costa had to ask him to come back, because without him the work could not continue. Several diplomats described the tone as "genuinely discourteous language", a textbook euphemism for saying there were insults between two European leaders. This was no protocolary tiff: it was the clash of two incompatible migration models, and it peine inside the very institution that exists to manufacture consensus.

What each side stands for: regularisation versus sealed borders

Sánchez put on the table the regularisation of hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants. His argument is that normalising their status makes integration easier, protects workers' rights and allows for better control of the situation.

Tusk replied that "this is the wrong approach". In his view, the solutions driven from Madrid put the security of the whole of Europe at risk because they encourage illegal border crossings, with consequences that other member states end up paying for. His prescription is the reverse: rigorous protection of the external borders, a fight against illegal migration, deportation of foreigners who break the law and room for a restrictive asylum policy. Two diagnoses, two remedies, one and the same Council.

Which countries are demanding a tougher migration policy in the EU

Poland joined Denmark and Italy as one of the three driving forces of the group demanding a hard line. The three proposed that the conclusions document include a much tougher response to illegal immigration. A majority of leaders backed the initiative, but they ran into opposition from the Spanish Prime Minister, joined by Emmanuel Macron and Luxembourg's Luc Frieden. The wording did not make it into the final text and the discussion stretched out the meeting to an unusual degree.

That is the awkward detail for anyone wanting to sell the summit as a clean victory: the majority backing the hard-line text did not translate into the final wording. A group of three governments drove the initiative forward, and another group of three managed to neutralise the wording. The tie was broken by drafting, that terrain where European summits settle their power struggles.

Why Warsaw leaked the row

The details of the meeting did not reach the press by accident: Tusk leaked them to show that Warsaw is not isolated on the migration question and that calls for a tougher policy are winning support among European governments. Poland's deputy interior minister, Maciej Duszczyk, said it bluntly: "practically all member states share the orientation proposed by these three countries. We still have to convince our friends from Spain and France. There will be plenty of opportunities to do so in the near future".

There lies the other key. A leak is a negotiating instrument, not an act of transparency: it serves to set the agenda ahead of the next meeting and to make the adversary negotiate knowing there are more people lined up against them than it appears. The power struggle did not end in the room. It moved to the headlines.

Ceuta, the remark Tusk has not withdrawn

The clash does not come from nowhere. During the Ceuta crisis, Tusk had already warned that "Spain must apply our migration policy if we want Schengen to survive". The remark remains the backbone of the hard-line argument: free movement rests on the control of external borders which, if it fails at one point, contaminates the whole. Within that framework, the Spanish regularisation is not read as an internal matter but as an externality for the partners.

At the extreme end of that logic, there are those who propose outright removing Spain from the Schengen area and letting each country fortify its own house. It is the maximal version of a current that, for now, remains in the realm of rhetoric: there is no record of any chancellery having put forward a formal proposal to that effect.

The "very bitter clash" that is sometimes just a long face

It is worth deflating the vocabulary. Some argue that much of the journalism calls any disagreement beyond angry faces a "very bitter clash", and that includes a perfectly by-the-book difference of positions. On this occasion there was something more — a walkout and a presidential mediation — but the bar for a European row remains low.

Beneath the noise there is a more interesting phenomenon: Europe's ideological map does not match Spain's. Some argue that European centre-left parties would be labelled far right ipso facto by Spain's left, and that forces regarded as radical here would pass for moderate centrists in other countries. Tusk belongs to the political family of the Partido Popular (Spain's conservative party) and, at the same time, some place him within the Polish centre-left. If that man is the Council's hard man, the scale moves by itself.

With these ingredients, the matter is not closed. The conclusions were left without the hard line, but the count of supporters has not been published: it lives on a piece of paper someone leaked and in the promise of "plenty of opportunities" at future meetings. Anyone claiming to know how many governments backed the hard-line text and how many merely nodded along is guessing.