Doublespeak in Brussels wages war through the European Peace Facility and seeks to censor the media using the Media Freedom Act, Hungary’s Orban says, as he accuses the Union of ‘raping’ Hungary and Poland with the new migration deal being pushed through without consent.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a veteran of European Politics who has led his country on and off singe 1998 has voiced his frustration at the direction of the Council of Europe meeting on Friday, with his government and likeminded Poland moving to block a joint statement of European states on immigration. The European Union has spent years trying to build a new approach to borders and migrant sharing since the migrant crisis of 2015 made old assumptions and practices obsolete, but a rift remains between open borders countries that want to spread migration across the whole continent, and anti-mass migration nations who don’t want functionally unlimited arrivals imposed upon them.
Under Europe’s plan, migrants would be redistributed over the continent and any nation that refused to take its share would be hit with considerable fines of €20,000 per head.
“The situation is getting worse”, said Orban on Friday, remarking would-be migrants were now shooting at border guards on his southern border and criticising the European Union in the strongest terms for trying to strongarm him into an agreement. He told journalists at the summit that: “Politically, it is impossible… legally we are, how to say it, we are raped. So if you are raped legally, forced to accept something that you don’t like… It’s impossible!”.
Poland has hit similar notes, reports Reuters, noting Warsaw had called the Union’s migration plan an imposed “diktat” and said it would reject the plan on security grounds. “There is no possibility of distributing illegal immigrants without the consent of individual member states… Poland puts a strong veto to such a position”, said Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Brussels diplomats cited by Politico said while Hungary and Poland were strongly against the plan for a joint declaration at the summit, no other nation supported the idea enough to stand up for the idea, and so it was destined to fail. “Nobody cares enough about the declaration to fight for it,” they are reported to have said.
Prime Minister Orban also criticised the European Union’s general direction of travel in other remarks, making unmistakable allusions to George Orwell’s Cold War novel 1984 when he spoke of the apparent double-speak in the works of Brussels. Orban wrote: “[Brussels] is creating an Orwellian world in front of our eyes. They buy and supply weapons through the [European Peace Facility]. They want to control the media through the [Media Freedom Act]. We didn’t fight the communists to end up in 1984!”.
Mr Orban said the European Union was losing control and rapidly running out of money, given it finds itself paying large amounts out of its fixed budget for unforeseen expenses to underwrite immigration and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Orban said while the Union was asking member states to increase their budget contributions, he said “there is no way Hungary can support a hasty, ill-considered budget amendment” and urged “self-serving” Brussels bureaucrats to focus more on doing their jobs and think less about their future careers.
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