For the past few years, Greece has been held up as having a successful model of immigration policy – a country that has managed to “get a grip” on the small boats that arrive at its sea borders.
In a praising tone, Laura Kuenssberg even asked the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis: “Like the UK, Greece has had to grapple with migrants arriving on its shores, but you have really cut the numbers… So do you think there are things we have to learn from you?”
It would be paradoxical if a small country like Greece, having only recently recovered from a devastating financial crisis, had also succeeded in controlling migration flows where the rest of the world appears to be struggling. But, then, it’s simply not true. Between January and June, the number of migrants from northern Africa reaching Crete was more than three times higher than in 2024.
Before a landmark ruling earlier this year, Greece favoured the “pushback”, a controversial practice that violates international law whereby small boats are prevented from entering its waters by force. In the Aegean Sea, migrants heading for Crete have been headed off and edged back towards Turkey. But in January, the Greek government was found guilty in the European Court of Human Rights of conducting “systematic” pushbacks of third-country nationals. The authorities remain under scrutiny for their role in a catastrophic shipwreck in 2023, which led to the deaths of around 500 people.
Facing unpredictable and unmanageable arrivals on its Aegean islands this summer, Greece has resorted to even more controversial solutions – of the kind that Nigel Farage now champions in the UK. So if you want to see how Farage’s plan for migrants would unravel, and how quickly, just look at Greece.
Would-be migrants typically make the 220-mile journey to Greece in unseaworthy boats from Libya to Crete, an island with huge political significance. To Greeks, it is something like Scotland: historically, its electoral map was always painted in the colours of the two dominant centre-left parties – but not in the most recent elections, when Mitsotakis, a conservative prime minister, won every single constituency on the island, a first in Greek political history.
Mitsotakis came to power as a centrist moderniser within the conservative camp (a David Cameron inside the right-wing party). He legalised same-sex marriage and reached out to the centre-left circle of former prime minister Costas Simitis, the so-called “Greek Blairites”. But those years now seem like an age of innocence. Today, his outreach consists largely of promoting hard-right figures to key posts.
One of them, the new migration minister Thanos Plevris, an admirer of Donald Trump, announced that asylum applications from north Africa would be suspended for three months. This mirrors Farage’s promise that under his plans, “If you come to the UK illegally, you will be ineligible for asylum – no ifs, no buts.” But perhaps Farage should take a closer look at Greece, where the ifs and buts quickly emerged.
A Greek law passed on 14 July means anyone entering Greece illegally from north Africa can no longer apply for asylum. Yet only a few weeks later, the European Court of Human Rights intervened, ordering Greece not to deport eight Sudanese until their suspension of asylum claims was examined by a court in Athens.
Almost at the same time, Plevris faced open resistance from the civil servants in his ministry, who refused to implement the measure. In a public statement, they argued that the policy was not grounded in law but merely in political directives: they said they could not sign off on decisions based on political instructions rather than legal provisions.
Confronted with a stalemate, the minister has started blaming NGOs for sabotaging the government, after one of them brought the case to the ECHR. He has also accused civil servants of pursuing a political agenda, adding that if they disagree with him, they should step down from their positions.
It is a very familiar path for populists who find their ideas impossible to implement in government: they retreat to the safety of opposition, now performing it from within government itself. It is also a future that seems all too fitting for Farage and the immigration policies he champions.
