When visiting a Siemens plant in Amberg, he invited Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer (CSU) to Prague.
“I think that the view of migration held by Bavaria has long been closer to the stance of the Czech government,” Sobotka said.
“When I take a look at the attitudes of the governments in Western Europe, Bavaria is one of the countries that have held the positions closer to those of the Czech government and the Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia),” Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) told journalists.
On the German political scene, Seehofer is one of the resolute critics of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU).
He says Germany must change its immigration policy in all its respects this year.
Seehofer insists on Berlin setting an upper limit for the accepting of refugees.
He spoke about 200,000 refugees a year, but over one million migrants came to Germany last year.
The Czech government has refused the EU redistribution quotas advocated by Merkel.
Sobotka said he and Seehofer had primarily discussed digitisation of manufacturing.
The Czech Republic must capture the technological changes in the form of digitisation that are coming to industry to keep its competitiveness in the decades to come, Sobotka said.
For the modernisation, it is necessary to improve the access to the high-speed Internet and to increase the partnership between the business sphere and technical schools, he added.
“If we capture the technological change, we will be successful in the next 20, 30, perhaps 50 years,” Sobotka said.
In the opposite case, the situation of the Finnish Nokia that failed to resist the pressure of technological changes may repeat in the Czech Republic, he added.
Sobotka said he believed Czech prosperity was closely connected with the prosperity of Bavaria and vice versa.
Sobotka and Seehofer are supposed to discuss migration and integration during Sobotka’s two-day visit to Munich in March.
Seehofer may come to Prague at Sobotka’s invitation to attend the opening of the Czech-Bavarian Land Exhibition in May.
Autor:
ČTK
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