Nine nations reject EU order to open borders

The European Commission on June 2 told nine governments to start removing their internal border checkpoints within the Schengen zone, the passport-free travel area covering 29 European countries and 450 million people. Germany, France, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden all maintain checkpoints that were supposed to be temporary. Some have run for over a decade.

The Commission has the legal power to force compliance. Article 258 TFEU (the treaty clause that lets it sue member states for breaking EU law) gives it exactly that tool. It has never used it for border controls. Instead, it issued non-binding opinions (European Commission, Mirage News) and recommended a "gradual phase-out."

Temporary Controls, Permanent Checkpoints

France has renewed its "temporary" controls 24 times since the November 2015 terror attacks. Austria has checked its borders with Hungary and Slovenia continuously since 2015. Germany expanded from its long-standing Austrian border checks to all nine land borders in September 2024.

Article 25 of the Schengen Borders Code allows temporary controls for a maximum of six months per threat. The EU's Court of Justice ruled in April 2022 that this ceiling is binding. Governments get around it by labelling each renewal a response to a "new" threat: migration one cycle, terrorism the next, Russian sabotage after that. France's Conseil d'État (its highest administrative court) blessed this approach in March 2025 by treating an October 2024 renewal as a fresh reintroduction, resetting the clock entirely.

The 2024 reform of the Schengen Code was supposed to tighten the rules. It did the opposite: extending the maximum duration from two to three years and adding new justification grounds. The reform re-legalized what courts were beginning to rule illegal.

Nine Capitals, One Answer

Germany's Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt rejected the recommendation outright, announcing another six-month extension. Italy's Lega declared "we decide who we check at our borders, not Brussels". Austria's FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl, who built his platform around "Fortress Austria", gave no sign of backing down.

One partial exception: the Netherlands plans to replace fixed checkpoints with mobile patrols by autumn 2026, a shift toward risk-based policing the Commission considers acceptable.

The €70 Billion Price of Political Theater

The cost is economic, but the reward is political. 3.5 million people cross internal Schengen borders daily. 1.9 million are permanent cross-border commuters. Nijmegen's mayor Hubert Bruls says the controls "damage the relationship between both countries" and cost commuters time and money every day. A study by the Centre for Economic Policy Research estimates the controls reduce EU trade in goods and services by 1.3%, equivalent to €70 billion in lost annual volume.

Migration researcher Gerald Knaus calls Germany's controls "symbolic politics that only the AfD used to demand". In France, Justice Minister Darmanin proposed a three-year immigration moratorium widely seen as positioning for the 2027 presidential race. Governments maintain controls that courts and economists question, because removing checkpoints costs votes.

A German court in Koblenz ruled in May 2026 that controls at the Luxembourg border violated the Schengen Code. Germany appealed and extended anyway. JEF Luxembourg (the Young European Federalists chapter) has called on Luxembourg's government to bring Germany before the EU court under Article 259 (the rarely used mechanism allowing one member state to sue another). No government has taken that step. The Commission won't use its enforcement powers. National courts issue rulings that the next six-month renewal simply overrides. Schengen, designed as a binding legal framework, now operates as a voluntary arrangement, maintained only where electoral incentives allow it.