Monday, January 08, 2018

Hungary's Orban Anti-Foreigner Populism

Victor Orban has been ramping up his anti-migrant statements ahead of elections in Hungary this April.
"We don't see these people as Muslim refugees. We see them as Muslim invaders," he told the German daily Bild newspaper. He said Syrian refugees were not fleeing their home country — where a multi-sided war has been raging for almost seven years — out of fear for their lives,  but rather "economic migrants in search of a better life... Christian and Muslim society will never unite," Orban told the paper.
 The refugees in question are Syrians who fled the civil war, and asylum-seekers whose right to protection has already been established by authorities in Greece or Italy. They are the only ones accepted to the EU-wide allocation scheme. The Hungarian Prime Minister deliberately lumps together refugees, asylum-seekers and illegal migrants, roundly refusing to take in neither one nor the other – pure populism that has little to do with reality. 
SPD chairman Martin Schulz said Orban was torpedoing the refugee distribution scheme, engineered largely by Merkel, in total disregard for EU law, despite being required by the scheme to take in just 1,920 refugees.
In September 2015, the European Council voted to launch an emergency scheme to relocate the hundreds of thousands migrants arriving in Europe The scheme was triggered as an emergency response from Italy and Greece, the main countries for the arrival of migrants landing in Europe as it became apparent that Greece and Italy could no longer handle that burden. Germany and France were due to take in just around 20  and 15 percent of all migrants respectively, while newer EU states, such as Hungary and Romania, were due to take in just under two and four percent respectively. 
 The European Court of Justice's decision Wednesday ordered all states to adhere to the quota, a handful of central European states had effectively refused to take part in scheme. Slovakia had taken in just 16, the Czech Republic 12, and Hungary and Poland none at all. 


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