A realistic deadline for putting the Schengen issue back on the agenda is 2025, PMP/PPE MEP Eugen Tomak tells RFI. He also criticizes the position of Austria, which opposed Romania’s accession to the Council of the CIS.

“I have looked very carefully at the program proposed by the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU, which runs from January 1 until the summer, and obviously it does not talk about expanding the Schengen area, only about strengthening the evaluation and protection mechanism. existing borders. Therefore, it is difficult for me to believe that in the coming months we will have a decision, and at the same time I am quite realistically dissatisfied, because I know how the mechanisms of the EU work, without consensus, without unanimity, decisions cannot be made. After the Swedish presidency comes the Spanish one. The Spanish also have problems with the arrangement of the sea border, because many migrants from North Africa come there. I find it hard to believe that this country will propose an expansion of the Schengen area (…). And 2024 is the year of elections to the European Parliament, this year no one will dare to propose the expansion of the Schengen zone for the sake of Romania. That is why I believe that a realistic deadline to be able to raise again this topic, which we are justifiably worried and worried about, is the year 2025.

As for Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehhammer’s explanation that the refusal to extend Schengen is a “security issue”, Tomak says they are “extremely frivolous and frankly ridiculous”.

“You cannot impose sanctions on a non-Schengen state for not working in the Schengen zone. This reasoning is an outright hallucination, I do not agree with the extension of the Schengen area, but I still vote for Croatia to join the Schengen area, given that all the statistics and Frontex reports show as clearly as possible that a large part of the migrants coming from the Middle East and Asia reaches Austria and the rest of Europe through Croatia, he said.

The PMP/PPE MEP believes that the main culprit behind the failure of Romania’s accession to Schengen is President Klaus Iohannis: “You cannot prepare for such a decision only a few weeks before, it should have been prepared in advance, and obviously the main responsible person because that failure is President Iohannis, even if he doesn’t want to take it on himself.”