Foreign minister: EU pledges solidarity to Greece

The European Union has pledged its full solidarity to Greece, which is facing massive pressure due to migrants arriving from Turkey, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó said on Friday in Zagreb, after an extraordinary session of EU foreign ministers.

Szijjártó noted that during debates on the 2015 migration crisis, “Hungary was savaged in the strongest possible terms when we talked about having to protect our borders, build a fence and send soldiers and policemen to the border to protect the country.” Hungary was subjected to the harshest political attacks and compared with the darkest dictatorships of the 20th century, he noted.

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Hungary’s stance has since become mainstream in Europe, as the “EU was speaking today about the protection of its external borders, resistance to migration pressure and supporting the fight against illegal border crossings,” Szijjártó said.

Szijjártó insisted that after five years, “the EU finally grasped that Europeans and European security needs to be protected.”

Europe has to make it clear that legal entry is the only way to reach it and that it does not tolerate illegal crossings, he said.

The EU has spent five years with the mistaken attempt to manage rather than stop it. Now, the debate ended with the section on the management of migration scrapped from the declaration, he said.

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Szijjártó said he had made it clear that Hungary would protect its borders and security, no matter the pressure, and had ensured Greece of Hungary’s solidarity in a similar endeavour.

Turkey announced on Feb. 28 that it would no longer be able to halt the increased number of migrants on their way to Europe from Syria and other countries.

Source: MTI