Swedish Education Minister Gustav Fridolin visited Hungary this week telling the Hungarian government and ruling Fidesz party to stop using Sweden as an example of failed mass migration policies.
The Education Minister, who is also a member of the Green party, travelled to Hungary to meet with leaders of Politics Can Be Different (LMP) party to discuss issues of education.
Fridolin said he was also concerned about the rhetoric used by the Fidesz party headed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which has pointed to the negative impacts of mass migration in Sweden ahead of April’s general election, Sveriges Radio reports.
“We have our problems and challenges the same as you probably have in Hungary. At the same time, we now see how people who have come from other countries to Sweden get more work, get involved, and contribute and make Sweden their own. It is obviously a description of reality that is also needed,” Fridolin said.
“The picture that Sweden, when we had and received so many asylum seekers, still has a positive development when it comes to economy and work, it actually needs to be there too,” he added.
Hungarians are set to go to the polls on April 8th and the Fidesz party has made mass migration one of the key pillars of the campaign.
This week, Orbán gave a speech on Hungarian radio saying: “Europe is full. Its external borders must be defended, and migrants must not be brought in – they must be kept outside Europe.”
And earlier this month, the Prime Minister gave a speech to a large crowd on Hungary’s national day saying: “Day by day we see the great European countries and nations losing their countries: little by little, from district to district and from city to city. The situation is that those who do not halt immigration at their borders are lost: slowly but surely they are consumed.”
Other members of Fidesz, like Minister János Lázár, have shown the impact of mass migration on other countries ahead of the election. Lázár made a video while visiting the Austrian capital of Vienna in which he walked through one of the city’s migrant-populated districts describing his experience.
The video was initially taken down and censored by Facebook but was put back up again several hours later.
While Hungary has seen very little migrant violence and no terror attacks since 2015, Sweden has seen a rise in rapes and fatal violence. A new report claims that the number of fatal violent incidents in 2017 was the highest recorded since statistics were first gathered in 2002.