According to daily French financial newspaper Les Echos, Greece is fighting for its life to avoid isolation as one country after another are sealing off their borders to refugees and migrants.
European officials may have been able to reach an agreement about UK’s threat to exit the EU, but they cannot manage the refugee crisis, says France’s first daily and most authoritative financial newspaper.
Austria’s decision last Friday to restrict the number of refugees it would allow to enter the country has been followed by other countries, thereby increasing pressure on Greece while making of mockery of European solidarity.
In a nutshell, the actions of several European countries shredded into pieces the agreement reached at last week’s EU summit in which all nations made pledges not to seal off their borders.
Les Echos notes that Greece will be the country most adversely affected by the decisions of its neighboring countries, such as FYROM, Serbia, and Bulgaria, to seal off their borders. A European official said that “Greece could be converted into a huge “open-air” refugee camp.”
It was this nightmarish scenario that prompted Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to threaten EU with a veto over the UK agreement if there was no commitment to keep the borders open at least until the upcoming EU-Turkey summit in early March.
However, it would be naïve for anyone to think that Turkey has an interest in collaborating with Europe over the refugee crisis, since it has no interest in keeping Syrian refugees permanently trapped inside Turkey.
But if Turkey fails to collaborate, Greece must be ready for complete chaos inside its own borders.
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