The Hungarians have decided: they do not want illegal migrants, and they do not share the intellectual frenzy of the European left, the Prime Minister said on Saturday who informed his audience of the results of the national consultation on the topic on the closing day of the 26th Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp (Tusványos).
Before an audience of several thousand people who gathered together on the sports field of the open university held in Transylvania, Viktor Orbán pointed out: one cannot see the political future with sharp eyesight, or with a pair of powerful binoculars because the future “is not ready”. We must decipher the future from that which we already know, and in the great competition of understanding the past, those will win who arrive at the right conclusions more swiftly and more courageously.
Today we must appreciate the conclusions of the phenomenon of modern-day mass migration, the Prime Minister said, adding that, with the disintegration of the countries of North-Africa, the defence line which once protected Europe, and which absorbed the masses of people coming from the interior of Africa, has evaporated.
“The real threat is not coming from the war zones but from the depths of Africa”, Mr Orbán highlighted, and warned that the current wave of mass migration is only the beginning.
What we have at stake today is Europe, the European way of life, the survival or disappearance of European values and nations, or their transformation beyond recognition, Mr Orbán pointed out.
The Prime Minister highlighted that the question now is not merely what kind of Europe we, Hungarians would like to live in, but whether that which we call Europe today will at all survive. We would like Europe to be preserved for the Europeans, he stated. “But there is something we would not just like but we want because it only depends on us: we want to preserve a Hungarian Hungary”, he stressed.
Mr Orbán takes the view that this must be pointed out repeatedly because there are some who think otherwise. The European left does not perceive immigration as a source of danger but as an opportunity, he said.
The left believes that the escalation of migration may definitively debilitate, or even eliminate, national boundaries, and this would constitute the attainment of the long-term objective of the left in an historical perspective, the Prime Minister told his audience.
“While the Hungarian left incited against Hungarians beyond the borders in 2004, they would today readily embrace illegal migrants, and would await them with open arms. These people, these politicians quite simply do not like the Hungarian people”, Mr Orbán concluded. In his view, a fair number of financial and political power centres in Brussels, too, have a vested interest in wiping away national aspects, and eliminating national identities. He added: if the left had been given the chance to form a government in 2014, “within a year or two, we would not recognise our country; we would be like a refugee camp”.
He remarked: there was a time when the EU offered genuine solutions to genuine problems, but something “has gone wrong”, and the once pragmatic Europe has become an ideological fixation.
“What we, Hungarians do is successful, beyond doubt, but does not fit into Brussels’ ideological concepts; in other words, it does not weaken but reinforces Hungarian national and state sovereignty, and is to be condemned from that point of view”, Mr Orbán said.
He reiterated: the first country which needed a rescue package after 2008 was not Greece but Hungary. Yet, after 2010, Hungary succeeded in reaching a point where its debts had not increased but decreased, and achieved this against the background of the fact that it never sought any kind of preferential treatment or respite for the repayment of its debt.
Viktor Orbán took the view: we may now clearly decipher the most important tasks from the phenomenon of illegal migration.
In the Prime Minister’s opinion, the Hungarian people cannot allow a repeated attempt at the multicultural model at their expense. At the same time, they must see the correlation between the masses of migrants coming to Europe and the spread of terrorism, as well as the fact that illegal migrants contribute to a rise in unemployment, and police statistics also confirm that wherever there are migrants in large numbers, security is compromised, and there is an increase in crime.
Mr Orbán established: illegal migration is equally a threat to Hungary and Europe, a threat to our common values, our culture and diversity. The country has found itself in a trap: ever newer waves of migrants are coming from the south, and there is a risk that migrants who left Hungary will be turned back to Hungary from Western-Europe. The country will not be able to endure this double pressure, Mr Orbán pointed out, who takes the view that this is the reason why it was necessary to find the points on which we can agree as a community within the framework of the national consultation.
The Prime Minister said: more than one million of the eight million questionnaires were completed and sent back, and according to the results, 95 per cent shared the view that we must support Hungarian families and children, rather than migration.
More than two thirds of Hungarian people find the issue of the spread of terrorism relevant to their own lives. Three quarters of them believe that illegal migrants are a threat to the jobs and livelihood of the Hungarian people. Four fifths take the view that the policy of Brussels regarding immigration and terrorism has failed, and we therefore need a new approach and more stringent regulations. The same percentage of people encourage the Government to adopt more stringent regulations in contrast to Brussels’ more lenient policy, it transpired from the answers given to the questions.
The Prime Minister believes: the results show that Hungary is a safe and stable country, and the Hungarian people want to remain a united and balanced nation in the uncertain world that surrounds them.