The Hungarian president, Viktor Orban, has once again shown this Friday his rejection of the reform of the migration policy of the European Union. In fact, he boasted in Vienna that his country is the only “migrant-free” country in Europe thanks to its border fences. He has done it in Vienna, where he has participated in a migration summit together with Austria and Serbia that once again highlighted the reluctance of those countries to open their borders.

“Hungary is a state with zero migrants. We are the only place free of migrants in Europe and that is due to our defense line,” Orban said after his meeting with the Austrian chancellor, the conservative Karl Nehammer, and with the Serbian president, the nationalist Aleksandar Vucic.

Orban said that the Hungarian model is the only one that is successful in this regard, explaining that it consists of the combination of a physical fence that, he said, migrants cannot cross, and the fact that the country does not allow entry to anyone until they are have resolved your asylum application.

Nehammer refuted his Hungarian colleague by stating that irregular migrants do not stay in Hungary and that 80% of them go from this country to Austria. “We have 109,000 asylum applications and Hungary 45,” summed up the Austrian chancellor.

All in all, Orbán insisted that the Hungarian “model” is the only successful one and accused the EU of wanting to change it to one that does not work by imposing mandatory distribution quotas for refugees and migrants.

“The situation is sad. Hungary has to defend itself against illegal immigrants, human traffickers, but also against Brussels,” Orban said.

Nehammer assured that the European Union’s migration system “is broken” and opined that the objective should be to prevent “migrants from taking the road.”

That is only possible, he said, if asylum procedures are applied in “safe third countries”, among which he cited Morocco or Egypt, by international organizations such as UNHCR, to prevent them from giving money to organized crime and “be shipped out to sea to die.”

Nehammer called for “orderly migration” to meet Austria’s labor needs but not one controlled by organized crime that takes advantage of people’s suffering.”

This summit on migration, organized by the three conservative politicians, has been criticized by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and also by Los Verdes, the environmental group that governs in coalition with Nehammer’s Popular Party.

On the other hand, Orban has assured that his government supports the entry of Sweden into NATO, pending only the approval of Hungary and Turkey, and said that the delay is due to the fact that Parliament has not yet ratified it, although his party has majority in the House.

“The Hungarian government has already made a decision on Sweden’s accession to NATO, and in a positive way. We support Swedish accession, but the Hungarian Parliament has not yet ratified this decision,” Orban said.

Regarding the Hungarian ratification will be delayed until September, after the summer break in Parliament, Orban declared that he is in permanent contact both with the OTA Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, and with Turkey and that Hungary will act if there is something to be done to “don’t delay decisions”. Dates, however, he did not give.

Stoltenberg has called a meeting for the next 10th with the Swedish Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, and the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to try to reach an agreement before the summit that the Alliance will hold in Lithuania starting on the 11th. .

Hungary and Turkey are the only NATO members that have not given the go-ahead to the membership of Sweden, which requested accession more than a year ago. Hungary has been delaying the entry of Sweden with arguments that have changed over time.

At the end of 2022, the explanation was that Parliament was very busy with the legal reforms required by the European Commission to have access to blocked economic funds. The Hungarian government then argued that Sweden and Finland had criticized the quality of the rule of law in Hungary.

There are analysts who see in this veto a way of putting pressure on the European Union to release the funds that it keeps frozen until Hungary shows that it will use them in compliance with community regulations.

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