4 December 2019, London

Balázs Beregi (Hungarian Television): Prime Minister, the NATO summit has just finished, and the summit’s closing statement gave a prominent role to the issue of migration and dealing with it. Could you say a few words about this?

Before that I’d rather say a few words about the fact that NATO was established seventy years ago. It was always important for Hungary to be part of the Western military alliance, and therefore Hungary joined the organisation in 1999. I’d like to mention the fact that I had the privilege of signing the accession agreement, which was a great honour for me; but it is also an important element of our political community’s identity, because, after all, it was the Christian-national forces that led the country into NATO during our first term in government. Since then, however, new challenges have emerged in the world. One of these is mass migration and the security risks that it brings in its wake – primarily through terrorism. We could say that thus far NATO’s approach to this issue has been ambivalent, or half-hearted: while it has accepted the existence of such a threat, it has not ranked it among its most important challenges.  This has changed now. So, looking to the future, the significance of this summit – at which  we’ve also celebrated the seventieth anniversary of NATO’s foundation – is that for the first time NATO has stated  that mass migration coming from the South poses a security challenge, and that therefore NATO must also deal with this issue. This is a great development and a major step forward – and, incidentally, in part this has finally been achieved as a result of several years of painstaking work by the Hungarian foreign minister and his ministry. We can also regard it as a Central European success, as we’ve always urged NATO to focus its attention on migration and the associated threat of terrorism.  NATO will also take action in the future, and we will mobilise more instruments and more money in combating illegal migration and the terrorism emerging in its wake.

Thank you.