No Tragedy Ever Enough to Change EU's Migration Policy: Hungary

Top Hungarian politician reflects on what he sees as weeks of tragedy caused by open borders policies, claiming events in France and the Mediterranean prove Hungarian voters are right to not want to participate in another migrant crisis.

Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó has cited the costly week of nightly riots experienced in France, and the recent tragic loss of life in the Mediterranean when an overloaded smuggler boat capsized as arguments against continued mass migration. The speech in the nation’s gothic revival parliament has been reported by domestic media as being noteworthy for its unusually strident nature, even by the standards of normally robust Hungarian politics.

Claiming the riots in France show that Western Europe’s attempts to integrate large numbers of migrants have calamitously failed — potentially a deeply controversial statement to observers in France, where the migration background to the recent riots or not has barely been discussed in the mainstream yet — Szijjártó said “It has become clear that it is quite simply impossible to integrate violent masses from other cultures arriving illegally in large numbers.”

Nevertheless, he reflected: “Maybe there are, or were, still people in Europe who lived with the vain illusion that Western European social integration efforts can be brought off successfully. Well, if they turned on the television and watched the news from France, then I think that your fantasy will quickly turn into disillusionment.”

The Foreign Minister’s comments as the European Union tries to agree a new migration deal, and so critics say, force that vision on a handful of members who would rather not take part. Including Hungary and Poland, the plan would oblige all EU member states to take migrant redistribution, or else cough up considerable sums of money if they disagree.

That the events of recent weeks, including the deaths of hundreds by drowning aboard a smuggler boat on a route into Europe that only exists because of weak border control, haven’t given European leaders pause for thought shows no tragedy is too great to get in the way of politics, he said. Szijjártó told the chamber:

No tragedy is enough to bring them to their senses in Brussels. No tragedy seems enough to change the migration policy in Brussels. There are not enough tragedies that we are witnessing from television broadcasts in the Mediterranean.

It is not enough to see the images that are being shot on the streets of the French cities, it’s not enough to have thousands of burned cars, not enough to have an almost lynched mayor, his wife, and his little child. Compared to this, European bureaucracy is once again performing the coup d’etat of pushing the migration quota.

Szijjártó cited scenes that would be familiar to his countrymen, the scandal of the conversion of a central Budapest mainline railway station into a migrant camp during the 2015 migrant crisis, (see pictures, below) saying Hungary did not want to return to those days. He said:

Hungarians do not want to us to look like Keleti Railway Station again, eight years after the events there. We will not be an immigrant country, we will not allow illegal immigrants in, we will continue to protect our southern border.

Szijjártó is just the latest of a clutch of European politicians who have cited the France riots as evidence that the continent has been going the wrong way on dealing with border control. As reported, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki struck similar themes last week when French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to walk out of a Brussels summit trying to negotiate that same EU migrant plan to deal with spiralling rioting at home.

Morawiecki wrote on Friday:

Shops looted, police cars set on fire, barricades in the streets – this is now happening in the center of Paris and many other French cities. We don’t want such scenes on Polish streets. We don’t want scenes like this in any city in Europe.

That is why we will defend the conclusions of the 2018 European Council, we will defend the principle of voluntary admission of immigrants. Stop illegal migration. Safety first.

…Our plan is Europe of Secure Borders – security and public order – these are the values ​​from which everything else begins!

Italian Undersecretary for the Interior Nicola Molteni has also made such claims, reports Politico, quoting him as having said that the France riots are a “certification of the failure of uncontrolled migration and a warning for the rest of Europe.”