Europeans “have the right to defend our borders, our lifestyle, our heritage and our culture,” the Czech prime minister has said, attacking “divisive” EU plans to foist mass third world migration on the bloc’s eastern states.
Andrej Babiš made the comments while visiting a museum in Prague with globalist French leader Emmanuel Macron, who on Friday had declared Europe was “not a supermarket” as he kicked off a two-day tour of the Czech Republic and Slovakia with demands that the patriotic Visegrad states fall into line regarding EU dictates on “migrant solidarity” and “fundamental values”.
“The Czech Republic has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe,” said Babiš in comments reported by AFP. “All those who come have a work permit. One must have the same system in Europe.”
“I have always said it’s like the Gaulish village of Asterix and Obelix. We have to defend Europe at its natural frontiers,” added the prime minister, speaking Saturday.
His reference to the legendary comics series, which features the adventures of a Gaulish village as they resist Roman occupation in 50 BC, followed similar remarks by the Czech premier in an interview published the previous day in Le Monde.
“I like comparing Europe to Asterix’s besieged village. We have the right to defend our borders, our lifestyle, our heritage and our culture,” he told the French daily.
Sections of the French press wondered if Asterix’s adventures, which first appeared in 1959, had fallen victim to censorship in Europe’s heated political climate and the debate over mass migration, when its 37th volume was published a year ago.
With the series’ “famous opening pages” omitted from the volume — meaning Asterix and Obelix were no longer introduced as “Gauls who resist the invader” — some media outlets questioned whether its publisher had felt “that this phrase, which is emblematic of the saga, is today too controversial to be delivered to an audience of millions?”
Speaking with Le Monde amidst repeated demands from Brussels and the bloc’s most Europhile leaders that Visegrad nations must follow western Europe into “multiculturalism” out of “solidarity”, Babiš had told the newspaper his nation was “ready to step up our efforts of solidarity” regarding the migrant crisis.
But the nation would do this, he explained, by “sending soldiers, police, [and] money” to frontline countries instead of being forced to take in third world migrants as part of the EU quota system which Visegrad leaders say encourages illegal immigration.
With France’s Emmanuel Macron touring Europe in a bid to gain support for a globalist grouping determined to impose a top-down, liberal EU superstate on the bloc ahead of the European Parliament elections next year, Babiš said he was so far undecided on whether to join with France’s former financier premier or to side with anti-mass migration populists.
Having launched new broadsides at the conservative governments of Hungary and Poland last week, Macron was hoping to use his trip to Bratislava and Prague to find and exploit cracks in the patriotic Visegrad nations’ alliance, according to French broadsheet Le Figaro.
Babiš, like other leaders in the four-nation bloc, has warned that resettling illegal immigrants was the “road to hell”, and earlier this week he asserted that economic migrants should be repatriated and the EU’s borders sealed shut to immigration from the Global South.
The Czech leader’s worldview, therefore, appears at odds with the vision of the Brussels-ruled Europe which Macron is determined to force upon all of the bloc’s member-states, as the French head of state has repeatedly insisted that closing EU borders to illegal immigration would be impossible, asserting that “the right to asylum is in our constitution … it is enshrined in all of our European texts”.
Describing mass migration from the world’s poorest and most violence-plagued nations as a “threat to European civilisation”, Babiš last month stressed that asylum seekers must be helped within the region of their homeland, telling national television: “We do not want to live here in Africa or the Middle East. We have to stop [immigration from these places].”
Macron, meanwhile, has declared that a liberal EU superstate would serve as a “role model” to the world of globalisation against the backdrop of a “great demographic transformation”, with Africa’s population set to double to 2.5 billion by 2050.
Claiming Europe is entering an “unprecedented” age of mass migration as a result of this “bombshell” population growth, with hundreds of millions of Africans set to flood nations in the bloc “for many years to come”, the French president insists the two continents’ destinies are “bound” — a sentiment previously voiced by European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker and other major globalist and pro-EU figures.