The physical, live force and legal border closure will be capable of managing the migration challenges of the period ahead; however, if further measures are required, the government is ready to take the necessary steps, Minister of State for International Communication and Relations Zoltán Kovács stated in an interview published in the Friday edition of the newspaper Magyar Hírlap.

He stressed that Europe’s Western half “always seeks to cover up reality” despite the fact that in many of the old EU Member States immigration has been an existing phenomenon for thirty to forty years and mixed societies have developed which are far from being success stories.

Additionally, most of the economic migrants arrived also in their countries illegally. “It is in this situation that today Europe is compelled to face the harsh reality that hundreds of thousands of people are trying to break through the EU’s external borders from the direction of Turkey and the Mediterranean,” Mr Kovács highlighted.

He took the view that “the present situation has evolved due to political impotence and indecision” and Hungary “proposed solutions in vain, effectively nothing happened”.

He said Brussels continues to think in terms of a pan-European solution, “they seek to take over the management of migration and asylum policy”. He pointed out that “this will evidently not work, the majority of Member States do not support centralisation which violates sovereignty, while of all countries it was Hungary and the Visegrád Four that served as a good example of the effectiveness of nation-state solutions.

The Minister of State said it is another source of threat that “the management of the problem is being shifted increasingly towards NGOs. These international organisations which suffer from a deficit of legitimacy want to, at most, manage rather than stop this process which they see as fundamentally positive”.

Mr Kovács took the view that so far only ‘show’ measures have been adopted in the field of the development of transit zones and border protection.

“For instance, they have increased the personnel of Frontex by one thousand five hundred, while the Greeks alone are now asking for ten thousand. What is an even bigger problem is that they have failed to understand that help must be taken where there are problems, instead of bringing problems to Europe. The situation should finally be normalised in Syria, Libya and the other crisis zones,” the Minister of State for International Communication and Relations stressed.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister)