Protecting Hungary’s southern border basically equals protecting the borders of Austria, Bavaria and Europe as a whole, and if it fails, “Schengen is lost”, Hungary’s prime minister said in Vienna. “It doesn’t feel good to be building a fence,” he said after talks with Chancellor Werner Faymann (SPD) and Vice-Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner (ÖVP), but if Hungary fails to protect its southern borders, Austria and Germany will face a daily influx of 10,000 or up to 250,000 migrants over the coming months, Orbán told a press conference held in the Hungarian Embassy in Austria’s capital.
The Hungarian Premier said he had gained the impression that Austria had withdrawn its friendship from Hungary in particularly difficult times; nonetheless, the Hungarian government is “prepared to put all that behind them.” He said that his government is prepared to “simply forget” that an Austrian politician had likened Hungary’s recent actions to those of the Nazis. He described this as “absurd “coming from someone in such a position. The Prime Minister suggested to his Austrian partners that the two countries should attempt to rather help each another, because from now on, in a legal sense, they are “in the same boat”: as regards migration, the situation on the Hungarian-Croatian border is the same as it is on the Austrian-Hungarian border.
Hungary’s fence on its border with Croatia constitutes a “political dilemma”, as Croatia is an EU member but not part of Schengen. Before closing the Hungarian-Croatian “green” border, however, Orbán said he would seek the support of Visegrád group member states. He also said that Hungary did not plan to build a fence on the Hungarian-Slovenian border. Field work is under way on the border to “clean up” a strip of land on the border and make it suitable for deploying mobile equipment. Since Slovenia is part of the Schengen area, nothing should be built there that cannot be “cleared” within a day, he said.
source: hungarymatters.hu, MTI and kormany.hu; video: euronews.com; photo: Gergely Botár – kormany.hu / MTI