Orbán: New EU migration pact could force Hungary to welcome migrants

Hungary does not support the new migration and refugee package presented by the European Commission on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told Reuters newswire on Friday.

Under the package, Hungary’s commitment to send people back from the southern EU states like Italy or Greece, where they first arrived, could turn into an obligation to accommodate them in Hungary, he said.

Budapest will not agree to anything that could lead to Hungary being under obligation to take in people coming from the Middle East or Africa, Orban said.

“That is a very problematic point… It’s nothing else but just renamed relocation. And we always reject relocation. This point is not acceptable for the Hungarian people,” he said, adding that asylum applications should be managed in “hotspots” outside of EU borders.

Orbán said the devil was in the details of the proposal. He called it good news that “some taboos have disappeared”, and welcomed that the bigger emphasis was on returning to their homelands those not eligible for asylum in the EU.

“In Hungary, we are very strict that we would not like to have a parallel society, or open society or a mixed-up culture,” Orbán said.

“We don’t think a mixture of Muslim and Christian society could be a peaceful one and could provide security and good life for the people,” he said.

The prime minister called Britain’s decision to exit the European Union a brave one but said that Hungary “can’t afford to follow that track” because it was too closely integrated in the EU.

Orbán said the EU only had itself to blame for the British referendum vote to leave the bloc because of the way it had treated the country. “We made mistakes, terrible mistakes,” he said.