Unpolitics, issue politicisation and Central European opposition to the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum

The New Pact of Migration and Asylum adopted in May 2024 was one of the top agenda items of the 2019–2024 European legislative cycle. The final voting results in the Council of the EU show signs of geographically concentrated opposition to the Pact, with the Central European Visegrád Group (V4) countries (Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland) supporting neither of the eight files which constitute the Pact. Drawing on semi-structured elite interviews and previously publicly unavailable Council documents, the paper seeks to explain what motivated V4 governments to refrain from supporting the Pact. The analysis combines insights from the emerging literature on populist foreign policy and unpolitics with work on the role domestic politics and public opinion on Member State voting behaviour to formulate two hypotheses on the V4 vote. The paper argues that strong domestic political support for populist anti-immigration politics determined governments’ vote not in favour of the Pact.