Viktor Orbán assures that migration will be his priority during the rotating presidency of the EU

BERLIN, June 23 (DPA/EP) –

The Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, defended this Saturday that migration will be a priority of the next rotating presidency of the European Union, which Hungary will hold for six months starting next July 1.

The head of the Hungarian Executive has stressed that “solving the migration problem” will be one of the axes of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union – which is exercised by semiannual rotation – in the second half of 2024, when he takes over from Belgium.

From Berlin, the Hungarian president has welcomed the position of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who is considering the possibility of outsourcing asylum procedures to countries not belonging to the European Union.

These statements come after Scholz announced this Thursday that the federal government will continue to examine asylum procedures in non-EU countries and will present concrete results by December.

In an interview with the German media group Funke, Orbán assured that his Government already does this in the so-called “external hot spots” in third countries before giving the green light to applicants to enter the country.

“If immigrants want to come to Hungary, they must first contact a Hungarian embassy, ​​for example in Belgrade, the Serbian capital,” explained the prime minister.

“It turns out that I was right about my warnings,” he declared, referring to the 2015 refugee crisis, when the president alerted other European governments about their border management. “You run an enormous risk if you open your borders to illegal immigration (…). Let’s wait to see what German or French society will be like in ten, 15 or 20 years,” he said then.

Along these lines, Orbán has defended his immigration policy, arguing that “the concept of society that I (then) perceived with refugees is too risky for Hungarian citizens.”

“It was obvious that they would not support the idea of ​​equal rights for women. Furthermore, there was widespread homophobia and a tendency towards anti-Semitism. Immigrants represented things that I identified as a danger to Hungarians,” he added.

According to the European statistical office Eurostat, only 30 initial asylum applications were submitted in Hungary last year, while in Germany there were just under 330,000.

These statements have occurred barely a week after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) sentenced Hungary with a fine of 200 million euros and a penalty of one million for each additional day that the country refuses to apply a 2020 CJEU decision that forces Budapest to change its protection and asylum policy.