Hungary and Bulgaria are bound by their similar views on the issue of migration, Zsolt Németh, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said after talks with his Bulgarian counterpart on Tuesday.
Bulgaria and Hungary share the same views on Europe, security policy, migration policy, European Union enlargement as well as a number of socio-political issues, Németh told a press conference he held jointly with Dzhema Marinova Grozdanova.
But the two countries are also bound together by culture and the issue of national minorities, he said.
Hungary has a prospering Bulgarian community and the country is committed to preserving this cultural and minority policy link with Bulgaria, he added.
Németh named migration as the number one challenge of the coming decades. Bulgaria has recently become the latest country to withdraw from the United Nations’ global migration pact and more and more countries are considering following suit, he said.
Németh said the main problem the withdrawing countries had with the pact was that it considers migration a positive and inevitable phenomenon.
“We, on the other hand, see it as a challenge that should be overcome rather than promoted,” he said.
Németh said another thing the two nations had in common was their ethnic minority communities in Ukraine. He voiced hope that the armed conflict in that country would be resolved in a way that guarantees Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and integrity while at the same time allowing the local ethnic minorities to preserve their cultures, institutional systems and languages.
He said the number one common task before Hungary and Bulgaria was advancing the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Western Balkans.
Grozdanova called Hungarian-Bulgarian relations “excellent”, saying that the two countries share similar positions in the EU and NATO and also cooperate in other international organisations. She thanked Hungary for its help in advancing the European integration of the Western Balkan region.
Source: MTI
