Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared that violence from migrants has “crossed the Rubicon” and his government will refuse to abide by diktats from the EU to force more migrants into his country.
Speaking at the opening of the Hungarian parliament’s autumn session, Viktor Orbán warned that the battle between Brussels and Budapest will likely “deepen” in the coming weeks over the EU’s latest migration pact, which was passed over the objections of the conservative governments in Hungary and Poland. Under the terms of the pact, member states will be forced into taking in illegal migrants who entered other nations within the EU or face fines of €20,000 per migrant they refuse.
The Hungarian leader said this represented a desire from Brussels to “force the migrant compact down our throat” prior to the European Parliament elections next year.
He said that instead of pushing migrant quotas, the EU should instead focus on “fences and border controls,” adding that the migrant crisis will not be resolved until “Brussels accepts that nobody should enter EU territory without an application approved and entry permit granted”.
Orbán noted that Hungary’s EU accession treaty “doesn’t contain a single word about the mandatory admission of migrants, migrant quotas or migrant ghettos, and we can’t approve anything like this afterwards, either.”
The conservative prime minister went on to claim that Hungarian authorities have prevented some 128,000 migrants from crossing their border illegally. Orbán said that attacks against border officials by migrants have become daily occurrences and that there have been 168 “severe attacks” this year.
He said that last week, joint Serbian-Hungarian border patrols came under fire from migrants with automatic weapons, which, Orbán declared, represented a crossing of the Rubicon, a reference to Julius Ceasar’s crossing of a river outside of Rome which ultimately spurred a civil war and the eventual end of the Republic. The idiom has, of course, since gone on to mean “passing the point of no return”.
The growing tension between member states over the issue of illegal migration comes amid what Orbán dubbed as an “invasion” of the Italian island of Lampedusa, which earlier this month saw 15,000 migrants land on its shores after crossing the Mediterranean from Africa in small boats, overwhelming the island which has a native population of just 6,000.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was elected on a hardline immigration platform, which even included calls for a naval blockade to put an end to the Mediterranean route, has so far been unable, or unwilling to take such a strict stance and therefore has overseen the highest number of boat migrants land in years.
Meloni has backed plans to send money to Tunisia and Libya to crack down on people smugglers but has also come out in favour of the EU’s migrant redistribution scheme, arguing that Italy should not bear the brunt of the crisis alone.
This has put her at odds with typical allies in Orbán and the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government in Poland, which has put forward a referendum on the migration pact for the public to vote on alongside the upcoming general election.
Even Brussels has begun to acknowledge the fractious nature of the migrant crisis, with the EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borell saying over the weekend that immigration could serve as the “dissolving force” which ultimately destroys the EU.
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