Hungary's nationalist prime minister reiterated his anti-immigrant stances on Friday, claiming that migration has a corrosive effect on EU legislation.
ADVERTISEMENTMigration will disintegrate the European Union, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday at the Cernobbio Forum in northern Italy, asking for new laws to stem its flow.
“If you look back from 2014 period until now, this period is a disintegration process period of European Union.”
The nationalist Hungarian leader, who has long been under fire for his vocal anti-migrant stances, having referred to them as “poison” and “not needed”, made the comments while discussing his three priorities during Hungary's six-month EU presidency: competitiveness, the war in Europe and migration.
Migration — as well as gender, employment, and security — is an “existential issue” facing the EU, he said. Reflecting on Hungary’s approach to illegal migration and comparing it to Germany’s generous asylum policy, he said, “We never let them in.”
After Orbán addressed the conference, he furthered these statements by posting, “Let Hungary and others have an opt-out of the common migration policy," on social media platform X.
‘Brussels can have them'
Meanwhile, a senior Hungarian official echoed these comments, stating the anti-immigrant government is serious about implementing a plan to provide asylum seekers free one-way travel to Brussels.
At a news conference in the capital Budapest, State Secretary Bence Rétvári claimed the EU wanted to force Hungary to allow “illegal migrants” across its borders and said the country would “offer these illegal migrants, voluntarily, free of charge, one-way travel to Brussels."
Rétvári said the transport would be conducted “after the implementation of the European procedure,” but did not detail what status the asylum seekers would have upon being transported. He made the comments while backdropped by a row of passenger buses with illuminated signs reading “Röszke-Brussels” — a route that would take migrants from Hungary's southern border with Serbia to the EU headquarters in Belgium.
“If Brussels wants illegal migrants, Brussels can have them,” he said.
Almost verbatim, Rétvári echoed the words of the minister in charge of the president's office, Gergely Gulyás, who said in late August, "If Brussels wants migrants, it will get them".
The provocative proposals to send migrants to the heart of the EU were in response to a June ruling by the European Court of Justice, which ordered Hungary to pay a fine of €200 million for persistently breaking the bloc’s asylum rules and an additional €1 million per day until it brings its policies into line with EU law.
The bloc takes issue with Budapest's forcing people seeking international protection to travel to Hungarian embassies in Serbia or Ukraine to apply for a travel permit. This violates EU rules that oblige all member countries to have common procedures for granting asylum.
Orbán’s government said it will file legal proceedings against the EU over the fines.
It has also demanded compensation for the billions it says it has spent on border protection, including constructing fences protected by razor wire on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia.
The EU has frozen billions for his government over breaches of the bloc's rule-of-law and democracy standards, and some EU lawmakers have petitioned for Hungary to be stripped of its voting rights in the bloc's executive Commission.
ADVERTISEMENTHungary's government missed the first September deadline for paying the €200 million fine ordered by the European Court of Justice, opening the way for potentially another conflict with Brussels.