Orbán: Border defence national duty

The kind of country that cannot defend its borders is not a country, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a radio interview on Friday.

“Every nation carries a truncheon … and whichever country waits for Brussels deserves its fate,” Orbán told Kossuth Radio.

“The nation that is unable to protect its interests is not a nation, or if it is — just about — it will disappear,” he added.

Orbán urged an intelligent division of labour within the EU, adding that the flood of migrants won’t be stopped by Brussels. A good migration policy should be pursued, he said.

“We don’t need a common European refugee policy, neither do we need a common European refugee agency. From that there would only be chaos, trouble and suffering.”

Orbán said that Brussels produced unworkable proposals “smelling of paper”. While giving the impression of leading the humanity game, people were simultaneously “drowning in the water while the terror threat and anti-Semitism grows in Europe.”

He said Hungary had waited for three months for a European solution to the migration wave from the Balkans. Lacking such a solution, it went ahead and closed its borders, changed the relevant laws and built the fence. All this stopped the influx of migrants, he said. “I recommend this to everyone.”

Photo: MTI

Speaking about the Visegrád Group letter sent to the Italian prime minister, Orbán said there were two options: “Either close shop or accept help”. Italy, he said, was one of the most important cradles of European culture and of key importance in the Mediterranean region.

The V4 expressed its willingness to join the initiative of German and Italian EPP interior ministers to stop migration in its tracks at the Libyan border.

Asked about the governments of fragmented north African countries that had refused EU help, he said military action was needed in those places.

Orbán accused the European Union of supporting “organisations called NGOs” that “work together with people smugglers”. He insisted that the Italian press was “teaming with proof” that organisations backed by US financier George Soros had worked to make Europe into “a continent of mixed peoples”.

Orbán also talked about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu’s recent visit to Budapest, which he called “historic”. Netanyahu’s visit was about discussing Hungarian-Israeli cooperation over the coming decades, he said. “And we found a key to the door,” Orbán said, noting a bilateral agreement under which Israeli tech companies will host Hungarian engineers and university students who will then have access to the most up-to-date Israeli technology.

He said the common thread linking the visits of Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Hungary and the Hungarian-Turkish joint government session in Ankara last month was that they were about setting up “external lines of defence” and protecting the Hungarian people. Orbán called Israel, Egypt and Turkey the “key countries” protecting the EU from new migrant waves.

If Turkey does not stop the wave of migrants, if Egypt’s population of 100 million “gets moving” and if Israel does not use its military to combat militant terrorist groups, there will be new waves of migrants setting off for Europe, Orbán said.

On the subject of his upcoming speech at the Baile Tusnad summer university on Saturday, Orbán was asked about the Baile Tusnad speech in which he outlined an “illiberal” democracy three years ago. He said he had expected a “liberal backlash” to his remarks, but did not see a need to overestimate its importance.

He rejected the view that the term “liberal” in Hungary should mean that democracy is eliminated if liberal parties are out of power.

“We believe in an illiberal approach; democracy is democracy, it doesn’t need a modifier,” he insisted.

Featured image: MTI

Source: MTI