Szabolcs Takacs, state secretary of EU Affairs, met Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini after a Hungarian embassy reception in Rome commemorating the October 23 national holiday. He stressed Hungary’s solidarity with Italy and its support for policies aimed at stopping illegal migration.
“We share the Italian government’s view that illegal migrants heading to Europe must be stopped at the African coast,” Takacs told Hungarian news agency MTI.
Italy has financially supported the Libyan coast guard as well as measures to counteract human trafficking, he noted, adding that the V4 wanted to contribute to these measures.
By banning ships that transport migrants, Italy has shown that maritime illegal migration can be stopped, he said, adding that Salvini’s migration policy has been an example of how illegal migration does not have to be accepted or merely “managed”.
“We concur that if we stop illegal migration outside Europe, there’s no need for an internal debate in Europe,” Takacs said.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban meanwhile reminded his audience that Europe’s greatness, strength and prestige are to be found in nation states that compete and at the same time cooperate with one another. He spoke at a state commemoration of Hungary’s anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 in front of Budapest’s House of Terror Museum on Tuesday.
“They are playing new imperial marches in Brussels today, though it is a different tune than the old one,” Orban said. Brussels is not Istanbul, or Moscow, it is not imperial Berlin, or even Vienna, Orban added. Brussels never set out to conquer anything, only to manage its colonies, he added.
“We, however, were never a colony or a colonial power,” the prime minister said. “We never took anyone’s homeland away, which is why we won’t give up our own to anyone.”
He warned that there was a growing number of military-age men arriving in Europe from other continents and other cultures, and that “in our lifetime they will shape Europe’s major cities to their own image”.
Orban explained that the “Brussels vanguard and other anti-nation state leaders” viewed migration as an opportunity to replace the EU of nation states with a multicultural, mixed population.
“A Europe without nation states, an elite torn from its national roots, alliance with the multinational power groups, coalition with financial speculators: this is George Soros’s paradise,” he said.
But Europe compares to no other continent, the prime minister said, because it is the home of nations, not “a melting pot”, he added.