On Kossuth Rádió’s “180 Minutes” programme on Friday, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that both Brussels and its Hungarian ally, the left, must be stopped, because they want to bring millions of people into Europe.
In the interview the Prime Minister said that he needed to draft the “Schengen 2.0” action plan because Brussels came up with an absurd proposal, which assumes that Europe’s demographic and economic problems must be solved by letting in the largest possible numbers of migrants.
This concurs with a document on the migration policy of former socialist governments in Hungary, which was revealed recently, he said.
Mr. Orbán pointed out that there is full agreement between Brussels and the Hungarian left: they want to bring millions of people into Europe.
“This programme of the former socialist governments envisaged that in the foreseeable future one-tenth of the country’s population would be foreigners”, the Prime Minister said, who added that “this is absurd, simply impossible”.
This must be stopped, he said, and therefore “from this point of view we should not only stop Brussels, but also Brussels’ Hungarian allies, the Hungarian left”. He added that this question must be closed definitively in Hungary with a referendum.
Due to the high rate of unemployment among young people in many places around Europe, Mr. Orbán took the view that young Europeans should be given jobs, rather than bring in “migrants from various cultures who cause problems of coexistence and increase the threat of terrorism”. In his view, however, this cannot be discussed in the same language in the West, which “lives in a bubble” and “in a state of intellectual oppression”.
The Prime Minister also pointed out that earlier there was a significant difference between the ways in which the migrant crisis was handled in Germany and Hungary. The Hungarian position focused on the protection of the external borders, while by contrast the Germans said that “there is an extraordinary situation, and everyone is welcome to enter without controls”. In the interim, however, Germany has changed its stance, and “today they are playing the same tune as we are”; in other words, he said, they also place the emphasis on the importance of protecting the external borders.
In summary he said that, whilst it does not admit it, Europe now has the same opinion on the primacy of protecting the external borders as that which Hungary has voiced from the beginning.
He indicated, however, that the current debate is about what should happen to those who have already been let into the European Union, or who are now entering – at this point in time mostly across Italy’s maritime borders.
In this context Mr. Orbán takes the view in principle that if someone has unilaterally decided to let in migrants without controls, the ensuing consequences cannot be shifted onto the international community. “If a decision to let them in has been taken at a national level, a decision on the consequences will also have to be taken at a national level”, he said.
He added that if we fail to stop Brussels – which favours the distribution of migrants – with a referendum, we may find that someone outside Hungary will tell us whom we should live together with.
Regarding the Schengen Area, the Prime Minister’s proposal is that the members of Schengen must honour their obligations – including protection of the external borders for those countries on the periphery of the EU. If any Member State fails to honour these obligations, he continued, the right to protect the external borders must be requested from them; if they fail to hand over this right, their Schengen membership must be suspended or they must be excluded.
On the subject of migrants arriving from Libya, Mr. Orbán pointed out that it is important that Libya has a government as soon as possible. With this government an agreement must be reached on setting up a large refugee camp – on the territory of Africa, by the coast of Libya – from which migrants could come to Europe in a regulated manner, provided that there are countries which are prepared to take them in. In his view, all of this should be financed and operated by the EU.