Election 2018 – Cabinet chief: Hungary will not budge on migration

Hungary will stand by the decision voters made on April 8 and will not budge one iota on its migration policy, cabinet chief Antal Rogán told news portal pestisracok.hu in an interview on Thursday.

Rogán said international attacks on Hungary’s migration policy “aren’t even particularly aimed at us”, but were part of a European debate about whether or not Europe would remain European or become a “continent of immigrants” with a mixed population. This is also what next year’s European Parliamentary elections will be about, Rogán said, adding that Europeans wanted the European Commission to come out in support of strong European borders instead of backing “the import of immigrants”.

“With the stakes this high, it is obvious that [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán is a gigantic plank in the eyes of billionaires like [George] Soros and politicians promoting migration,” Rogán said. “They want to discredit us and the other governments opposed to migration as quickly as possible,” he insisted.

Asked about last Saturday’s anti-government demonstration,

Rogán called it “extremely funny” that “certain people can chant that there’s no freedom of speech or democracy when they themselves are proving the opposite of this”.

“If I remember correctly, when we went out to demonstrate in 2006, we were beaten up badly and no one protested against that in Europe,” he said, referring to the events of the autumn of that year, when anti-government protests regularly turned violent, leading to clashes between protestors and police. “No one was worried for Hungarian democracy.”

Rogán said it was “completely normal” for those “who had hoped for a different result” in an election to voice their opinions and demonstrate. “What I have a problem with is that the protesters are being riled up from abroad [by those] with ulterior motives,” the cabinet chief said. “This goes against democracy and is completely unacceptable.”

On another subject, Rogán said that it was not businessman Lajos Simicska who had “ruined” Jobbik or the daily Magyar Nemzet, which was closed down by Simicska last week, but rather “the Jobbik leaders and journalists who joined forces with him at their own free will and accepted his money in return for carrying out his instructions”.

Source: MTI