In the carpeted runway just outside the European Parliament’s debate chamber relieved MEPs looked as if they had just applied a tourniquet to a stab wound as the EU Migration Pact comfortably passed the chamber in what was the final chance by parliamentarians to derail the epoch-defining piece of legislation.
Despite denouncements by populist MEPs who took to the lectern to warn that the Pact placed asylum matters away from national governments and into the hands of ideologically charged Eurocrats all ten components of the legislation attained a majority from lawmakers.
From demanding Ireland provide housing to asylum seekers to establishing a “solidarity mechanism,” whereby northern Europeans would finance refugee warehousing on the Mediterranean or pay a GDP-related fee if enacted, the Pact will be a generationally defining piece of EU law.
“What else can we do but try to manage the chaos?” admitted one pro-European sitting next to me as we watched MEPs cast their votes, intermittently interrupted by open borders activists who had packed the galleries using NGO accreditation.
Another decade’s worth of chaotic refugee flow, my Europhile friend reckoned, would consign the EU to the history books, as one Flemish MEP Tom Vandendriessche was nearly kicked out of the chamber for using the term “population replacement.”
On the day, bar some contrarianism by Sinn Féin’s Chris MacManus and left-independent Clare Daly (aptly wearing her “More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish” T-shirt), all Irish MEPs backed the Pact.
Brussels envisions that the Pact will come into effect circa May 2026 with Helen McEntee’s Department of Justice now drafting an implementation plan to subordinate Irish asylum policies to EU diktats.
It was no coincidence that the Pact was being rushed through the EU Parliament two months shy of the EU election. These results subsequently weakened the chamber’s pro-EU majority with leftist MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld admitting in one exasperated speech that either Brussels could regulate migration now or let future nationalist governments do so.
After the vote, MEPs filed out for respective press statements as a chirpy Commission President Ursula von der Leyen congratulated MEPs for not puncturing a decade’s worth of policymaking and voting against the Pact.
Speaking behind a portable podium Von der Leyen stated her next port of call would be Tunisia, Lebanon, and Egypt where she would negotiate new agreements to exchange student visas for assistance with refugee flow.
Amid all this hullabaloo I noticed one silver-haired Nordic woman watching the media carnage from behind the guardrails separating us in the press pack from MEPs and other officials. Brandishing her trademark feminist medallion, Swedish Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson had done more to formulate the Migration Pact than any one MEP scrambling around Brussels that Spring day.
Originating on the radical left in the 1980s with the Communist Party before transitioning into the governing Social Democrats and becoming Stockholm’s Commissioner pick, Johansson was grilled over allegedly wanting to impose Swedish-style open border policies across Europe when she took up the EU gig in 2019.
Many of the right-wing Swedish Democrats I had gotten to know in Brussels had been politicised by the impact of Johansson’s asylum policies, including one who joined the aforementioned populist party after awakening to the sound of grenades in his normally tame suburb.
Using her role dictating the EU’s migration policies Johansson and her notoriously left-of-centre team at the EU’s Home Affairs Directorate were the quiet hands behind the drafting of the Pact from 2020 onwards, often with the able assistance of pro-migration NGOs.
As McEntee and O’Gorman stumble through asylum debacle after asylum debacle real power is now transferring to backroom officials like Johansson with the Pact the cementing act in depriving Dublin of any real wriggle room on the refugee issue.
In keeping with how the EU traditionally works, using salami-style tactics to cleave away national sovereignty, the Migration Pact is aimed to enshrine Brussels supremacy on migration without national electorates even noticing.
Similar to what Italy’s Meloni is facing today, a potential Irish populist, or at least centre right, government in the 2030s may face weaponised EU institutions including the ECB if it goes against Brussels on asylum matters courtesy of the legislative work done by Johansson.
Johansson’s primary coup de grace came in 2021 when she turned the knife on then Frontex boss Fabrice Leggeri, for having the temerity to enforce EU border controls, as the Swedish Commissioner continued to set the tempo on Brussels’ institutionally pro-open borders stances.
Leggeri returned to Brussels this year as a right-wing Rassemblement National MEP with a warning that Johansson was “encouraging” illegal migration, going on to claim that Europe faced the apocalyptic prospect of up to ten million refugees per annum within a decade.
Johansson made international headlines for comments in Athens this June stating that the EU needed, at a minimum, one million third-world migrants annually to make up for a collapsing birth rate.
She also understands that the simple open door policies of the 2010s are no longer viable. Johansson has spearheaded a new approach of management migration where the EU seeks to fill the vacuum left by the neverending asylum crisis before populist governments do so.
Johansson perfected her craft of attempting to strangle disquiet over migration through flimsy social engineering during her tenure as Swedish Integration Minister where she attempted to quell Sweden’s migration influx with work programmes and refugee redistribution.
In May I got my hands on internal documents describing the efforts of Johansson and her colleagues to covertly tilt the scales on the finer details of the Migration Pact’s implementation, specifically in the monitoring of housing given to asylum seekers, warning that the much-lauded EU system of tracking refugees (Eurodac) was likely to be delayed.
Johansson will conclude her five-year tenure by year’s end. Her victories include establishing a punishing legislative framework that will haunt any attempts by any future Dublin government to reign in migration in the years to come.
Johansson hopes that Dublin will soon be too integrated into the EU’s asylum mechanisms to dare diverge from accepting tens of thousands of asylum seekers per annum, regardless of who is behind the Taoiseach’s desk, similar to how Brussels has clawed away Irish sovereignty on monetary affairs post-Crash.
The Department of Justice clarified to me that a “senior level interdepartmental programme board” has been assembled to prepare Ireland’s specific implementation of the Pact by December of this year.
Only then will we see the gorey details of how Ireland looks set to implement EU asylum edicts on already stretched towns and parishes. Minister McEntee is already praising the harmonisation of our asylum policy with the rest of the EU, regardless of the logistics of merging Irish refugee policy with countries as divergent as Greece or Slovakia.
Long after Johansson enters a pampered, taxpayer-funded retirement future Irish governments, whatever their political persuasion, will have to battle intentionally tough EU red tape on migration erected by this Swedish communist (even if that means prioritising bogus asylum applications over communities).
Sometimes walking past Johansson’s office adjacent to the European Parliament I think over Ireland’s needless opt-in to the Migration Pact and the fiscal and social timebomb it will unleash on society at large.
Rather fittingly Johansson’s headquarters face onto a converted Brussels hotel now packed to the rafters with male asylum seekers often seen smoking crack cocaine in the evenings and even dealing narcotics openly in public in the shadow of the EU Parliament.
Will future Irish ministers even know Johansson’s name in a decade’s time as they hand out billions, even under recession conditions, for refugee management in Italy and Greece, or bus in asylum seekers into communities around Ireland?
The savvier leftists in Ireland and across Europe end up in Brussels to impose their worldview over the heads of electorates mastering a bureaucratic machine that by its nature supersedes national democracy.
Remember the name Ylva Johansson as Ireland’s asylum turmoil ramps up a gear in the coming years.
This soft-spoken Swedish bureaucrat wielded more power to dictate who enters Ireland than any Minister for Justice or TD in the past twenty years and she did so without a single vote cast in her name.