(AFP) French right-wing presidential hopeful Valerie Pecresse on Saturday slammed the EU’s “sieve-like” borders for allowing migrants to enter undetected and backed calls for barbed-wire fences to prevent them crossing illegally into the bloc.
Pecresse, whom polls show as President Emmanuel Macron’s top challenger in the April 2022 election, rammed home her position during a visit to a migrant camp on the Greek island of Samos.
“We cannot have a sieve-like Europe, a supermarket Europe where you enter and leave as you please,” the conservative politician, who styles herself as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, said.
The Samos camp is one of three new migrant facilities on Greece’s Aegean islands, which acted as a gateway to the EU for over one million asylum seekers in 2015. Most were Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan, arriving by boat from Turkey.
