News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @[email protected], @[email protected], or @[email protected].
It is just dumb, they can't control all border crossings because lots of them look like this:
It is border AT-CZ but Jon Wort on mastodon has more examples and his perspective on blog.
I don't see the problem.
I know the right candidate to guard that boarder.
Is it true that he is invincible?
'tis but a scratch
You really dont, do you?
That's also not the goal. The goal is to keep the organizations that do this up and running and ready to do their job, exercise them as you will
While at the same time checking some people and or possibly acting on targeted information.
The actual goal of those border controls is just populist knee jerk bullshit to score sympathies with the people who are increasingly voting for the Nazi party.
The political establishment has been predictably unsuccessfully trying to appease the far right by copying their talking points for years by now. This is just another escalation of this disgraceful act, after the Nazis scored high in two state elections.
Yeah, everything has one reason. It's not as if another Schengen country is lax on their border and cozy with Russia and china while the geopolitical tensions, espionage and sabotage as high also.
But knee jerk border checks on a handful roads won't change that in any meaningful way. All it will do is funnel away resources that would be needed elsewhere more urgently. And look impressive on the news.
All while undermining one of the greatest achievements of the EU.
More kneejerk reactions in a misguided attempt to take on populist talking points while just making fascist politics more socially acceptable.
Countries have been "temporarily suspending shengen agreement" for tons of reason without putting the EU at risk. I remember being stuck in trafic over 1h when crossing the French border in the summer 2016, where between a football cup, and the terror attacks, the police was "checking the border" ( to be understood as, police kept only one lane open on the highway, and even as setup a tent and a parking so they can "randomly check" some cars.
I also remember covid time when travelling within EU was involving a lot of paperwork.
Not sure what's happening right now in Germany, but it's not the first nor the last time, that the open-borders are suspended.
I feel like if there is a border problem with illegal entries to the EU, we don't solve it with tightening border security of individual countries.
This is something the EU members have to solve together and maybe countries with less or no outside EU borders have to support the border security of those who have.
Send contingents of border guards to the outside borders to support those countries to strengthen their borders to non EU countries. An international EU wide collaboration on border security is needed in my opinion.
Oh stfu with the alarmist nonsense. The Schengen treaty allows for temporary border checks. And the Germans use the max allotted time within the Treaty.
Oh no.. Germany exercises their right according to the Treaty!
Edit: stfu to the writer of the article.. not OP.
In the past decade, border checks have become the usual case instead of the exemption. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/11934a69-6a45-4842-af94-18400fd274b7_en?filename=Full-list-of-MS-notifications_en.pdf
Besides Germany, Schengen members currently operating controls on particular borders include Austria, which cites Ukraine-related security threats and pressure on asylum to check arrivals from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary. Denmark, citing terror threats related to the war in Gaza and Russian espionage risks, is carrying out checks on land and sea transit from Germany, and France is checking Schengen zone arrivals on the grounds of an increased terror threat. Italy, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Finland are also operating border checks, variously citing terrorist activity, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Russian intelligence activity, increased migration flows and organised crime in the Balkans.
So everybody already does it, why shouldn’t Germany do it, too?
Germany is the large, economically vital bit placed smack-dab in the middle of the EU. Also, this achieves literally nothing positive. It won't stop terror attacks but it will hurt the economy and it will help validate right-wing extremist talking points.
Not changing anything of the current procedures will send the impression of helplessness and inaction to growing parts of the society. While I‘m not happy with this blame game, doing nothing is out of the question for the Ampel since even the Union is taking populist narratives and helping rightwing parties by constantly demanding improvements.
If we had a stronger chancelor, they could challenge the narrative. They could deliver the usual "terrorists want us to be frightened but we are a strong open society", like Merkel did after the vastly more deadly Breitscheidplatz attack and find out what went wrong together with e.g. police and the asylum residence in the background. What the coalition is doing right now is just eroding trust in the state and the government on the part of migrants and bio-Germans alike.
With new EU asylum and migration regulations only coming in effect in 2026 (two years, although it is one of the most important topics in a lot of EU countries and rightwing on the rise everywhere), this is simply taking too long to do absolutely nothing locally. https://commission.europa.eu/news/setting-out-plan-put-migration-and-asylum-pact-practice-2024-06-12_en
Not "do nothing" (although that would arguably still be the better option), but rather "do something actually useful" (like actually find out what went wrong where and whether you can do something about violent extremism, like, say, regulating TikTok to behave more accountably). This is worse than useless.
There is no max alloted time, there is a max alloted time per decision but France has been chaining them back to back for years with no issues.
I suppose if smaller countries tried to do the same they would be brought to heel via political measures.
No we’re just doing something to address the feelings of the German population that is suffering from ever increasing brain rot, all while we ignore our actual problems such as an underfunded education system, decades old and fucked up infrastructure, lack of digitalization, a collapsing pension system, an overwhelmed public health system, climate change, and much more.
The whole migration trope appeared out of nowhere still like a year ago, just before the genocide in Gaza started dominating all news. My biggest problem at that time was that the fucking bus is not coming and that it takes forever to get a doctor's appointment and by now I’m pretty sure that all of this migration panic is some Russian psy-ops.
Cool, if you are not interested in motivations and consequences.