BUDAPEST — The collision of exasperated migrants and overwhelmed authorities created chaotic scenes Tuesday at choke points up and down the route being traveled by tens of thousands of people seeking refuge in Western Europe.
From the idyllic Greek islands to the fertile plains of southern Hungary, a pileup of people impatient to cross seas and borders produced tense standoffs and desperate flights as migrants sought to bypass registration systems that have broken down amid the crush of new arrivals.
At the Serbian-Hungarian border, as police looked on, hundreds of people chose to dash into a cornfield rather than sleep another night on the patch of dirt where they had been confined while they waited to be registered.
Nashat Murad, a 28-year-old lawyer from Damascus, evaded police altogether by slipping over coils of razor wire at the border, leaving his fingers dotted with bright-red puncture wounds.
“Just let us cross to Germany,” he said as he jostled with other migrants to board a westbound train at the Budapest station. “We’ve already suffered a lot.”
The refugee crisis spiraled as European leaders prepared to wrangle over a plan that observers say will almost surely fall short.
On Wednesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is set to propose a quota system for relocating 120,000 asylum-seekers from the front-line nations of Greece, Italy and Hungary and spreading them across Europe, according to European accounts of the draft plans.
Together, Germany, France and Spain would take more than half, according to a draft tally published by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.
The remainder would be distributed across the rest of Europe. But the plan is likely to include an option for nations opposed to taking in refugees to pay money to help other European Union countries shoulder the burden.
Germany estimates that it might shelter as many as 800,000 asylum-seekers this year. The country’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, braced the nation for what could be half a million refugees a year for “several years.”
On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, standing with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, called on other EU nations to do more.
“We should be clear and to the point,” Merkel said. “I am deeply convinced that this is a task that will decide whether we maintain our European values. The entire world is watching us.”
Reaction to the plan due to be unveiled Wednesday will be a crucial test amid a crisis that has challenged European resolve.
Among the goals of the plan is to create EU-run processing centers in front-line nations such as Italy, Greece and Hungary.
Now, the processing of migrants is handled differently from country to country. Many of the systems are rudimentary, with officials using pen and paper to record the presence of thousands of people streaming in from countries across South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
With tens of thousands of people traveling the well-worn path northward from Turkey into Europe, the process has broken down.
On Monday, a record 7,000 people crossed the Greek-Macedonian border, including 4,000 who came streaming into Macedonia in one chaotic hour, said Alexandra Krause, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative at the crossing.
On Tuesday, she said that 4,800 people had crossed by mid-afternoon, but that the situation was calmer because people were coming over in small groups. Still, she said the mood remained tense.
“There are a lot of rumors floating around,” she said. “People are anxious that the border might be closed.”
