‘If we cannot solve this, Schengen is over’: Hungarian PM’s insights into European migrant policy
As thousands of migrants stream into the EU, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban met with his Austrian counterpart, Werner Faymann to try ease the tensions between the two countries that have been rising due to their differences over how to respond to the crisis. RT recaps the results of the meeting in Orban’s best quotes.
At the press conference that followed the meeting, Viktor Orban said that relations between their countries were “better than they were at eight o’clock today.”
Austria had “denied its friendship to Hungary in particularly difficult times and I came to restore the earlier condition,” Orban said, as cited by AP.
Faymann, in his turn, described relations between the neighbors as “correct,” but admitted that there was some “tension,” which “shows we have to talk to each other.”
The Austrian leader has been one of the harshest critics of Hungary’s refugee policy, comparing it to the Holocaust two weeks ago. Hungary’s razor wire fence has imposed restrictions on the human right of freedom of movement and right to seek asylum, according to Faymann.
READ MORE: Slovakia to challenge refugee quotas in court, Hungary takes aim at EU budget
Here are Orban's six best statements made at the press conference:
(1)"We feel that Hungary is left on its own when it has to struggle with a problem which is primarily ours, because this is appearing at our borders, first of all. But it is not only our problem, but this is also a problem of Austria, Germany and many other European countries."
(2)
(3)"We’re doing things not in a good way because European leaders never wanted that these tens of millions of people would move into Europe, we never decided about that. Still, in the minds of these people they have a picture that Europe is welcoming them and it is going to receive them."
(4)
(5) "The size of the challenge is tremendous. The migrants are coming in an endless form – this is not reflected in the minds of European leaders."
(6)
The current refugee crisis, the worst since World War II, broke out this spring. According to the European statistics agency Eurostat, the number of asylum seekers arriving in the EU in the second quarter of 2015, estimated at 213,200 people, was 85 percent higher than during the same period last year.
In September, when hundreds of thousands of migrants on their way to Austria and Germany entered Hungary, its authorities ordered that a fence on the Croatian border be completed, while the parliament passed a law allowing the military to be used in dealing with the refugee crisis.
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