According to the Minister of State for International Communication and Relations at the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister, changing the narrative related to migration is a task of the period ahead.
On Friday, on the first day of the three-day Budapest conference on the issue of global migration which was organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Zoltán Kovács highlighted that today the facts, actual data and trends related to migration are accessible to everyone, while the acts of terrorism that have taken place since 2015 have proved that migration is the biggest challenge of our time. Despite this, we must still struggle with misunderstandings.
In the past three to four years, Hungary has been in the cross hairs of “a diabolical communication campaign” which implies that the Hungarian government does not talk about reality as regards migration, he said.
As an example, Mr Kovács showed a photo of a migrant family lying on railway tracks which was taken in 2015 in Bicske and which implied that the Hungarian police were treating illegal migrants in an inhumane manner. The problem is that these images influence people’s perception of migration, he pointed out.
Therefore, changing the narrative is the single greatest task in hand, and Hungary can only hope that a new narrative can defeat the narrative that prevails today. Only those narratives survive which have some semblance of reality, and Hungary’s narrative is closer to reality than any other, the Minister of State said.
He added that Hungary has been at the front line of the communication battle for eight years, but is still holding on in the siege, and has shown that through the issue of migration we can adopt the right attitude to all the challenges of Europe.
If there is an appropriate attitude to migration, we can then talk about families, the economy, the institutional issues of the European Union and democracy, Mr Kovács stressed.