text: Many of these parties are skeptical of the EU itself, but particularly of the bloc’s migration policies. Some of that skepticism has been a centerpiece of government policies in Italy, Austria, and elsewhere. Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s opposition to immigration, for instance, has helped ensure that fewer migrants are making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Italy, the previously favored destination. Italy saw a 61 percent decline in the number of asylum seekers, according to the EU data. (Left-wing parties that call for more immigration, such as Germany’s Greens and Sweden’s Left Party, have also made significant gains, but are not part of governments in their countries.)
  
  Read: The far right isn’t the only rising force in Germany
  
  Europe’s traditional center-right and center-left parties are not blind to the prevailing political winds. Rejections of asylum applications outnumbered approvals by a two-to-one margin last year, according to the European Asylum Support Office. (In 2015, one in two applications was successful.) Germany, whose open-door policy for Syrians fleeing the civil war sparked the flow of migrants into Europe and consequently saw a far-right party enter Parliament for the first time since World War II, has tightened its rules—though it remains the top destination for asylum seekers. Berlin has sped up how it makes decisions on asylum requests, a process that in theory also speeds up the deportation of those whose claims are denied. Additionally, Berlin now deems Afghanistan a safe country, meaning Afghans seeking refuge in Germany are no longer assured of it.
  
  Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the head of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing Christian Democratic Union, recently said Germany “must make sure nothing like” the surge of Syrian migrants “ever happens again.” Sweden and other countries are also rethinking their relatively liberal humanitarian migration policies in the face of public backlash.
  
  Read: The refugee detectives
  
  A fundamental challenge for the bloc is its piecemeal policy on asylum. Prior to the crisis, the so-called Dublin rule, which mandated that migrants seek asylum in the country where they first arrive, appeared to be sufficient to handle the relatively low number of claims. But that fractured when hundreds of thousands of migrants from Syria and elsewhere began arriving in Italy, Greece, Spain, and the frontiers of eastern Europe to make their way west.
  
  Since then, the EU has tried to forge a common asylum policy, but with no real success. One major stumbling block is whether Brussels can enforce a quota that distributes refugees among the bloc’s members so the Mediterranean states in particular don’t bear an unfair burden. Governments in countries such as Hungary, which have been vocal about their opposition to migrants in general and Muslim migrants in particular, have adamantly opposed this plan.
  
  Yet while migration and asylum continue to dominate Europe’s politics, the numbers show that the issue is not as pressing as it once was.