Arab Spring and tulip wars test Euro border agreement

Whether it was corruption and crime or immigration, many European politicians and analysts said that the stated reasons for the challenges to Schengen were merely pretexts for right-wing parties to promote their nationalist agendas.

One of the right-wing parties that has challenged the Schengen Agreement is Denmark's anti-immigrant Danish People's Party. From 2001 until the election defeat last month, it had propped up a centre-right minority government and succeeded in tightening Denmark's immigration rules. It had also pushed through some new border controls, mainly along the German frontier, ostensibly to counter crime in the border area.

One of the first acts of the new Social Democrat dominated government in Denmark was to scrap the plans for new border controls. Yves Pascouau, an expert on migration and Schengen at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, warned that the prominence of the migration debate in elections could lead to greater volatility on the issue in Europe over the next few years.

Despite the electoral stakes, he was sure that populations would continue to back Schengen. "I would be very surprised to see other governments do as the Danes wanted to do and I would be surprised if the populations would agree to that. People don't want to queue for hours at the Franco-German borders or have lorry drivers wait in kilometres-long lines."

http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/europe/arab-spring-and-tulip-wars-test-euro-border-agreement