Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban believes refugees are a severe threat to Europe’s cultural and religious existence.
Hungary and Orban have been upfront with their reluctancy to accept any European Union deals of mandatory refugee quotas. Several European leaders have called out Orban for his lack of cooperation, but he feels he has his people’s backing.
“They would hang me in the nearest light pole here in Budapest if I agreed to something like that,” Orban said in an interview Wednesday with German newspaper Bild-Zeitung. “A refugee quota would change Hungary and Europe ethnically, culturally and religiously.”
The Hungarian migration office reported just 508 out of 177,135 asylum seekers in the country last year got permission to stay. The same agency estimates just 17 percent should be considered legitimate refugees, meaning they are not economic migrants. Hungary was the first country to break the Schengen agreement of free movement when it erected a fence along its borders in October. The fence managed to almost completely stop the refugee influx, which led several other countries to do the same. (RELATED: Hungary’s Trump-Style Fence Keeps Refugees Out)
Orban used the opportunity of speaking to a German newspaper to wish Chancellor Angela Merkel best of luck with her “experiment” of keeping borders open. (RELATED: Merkel: ‘Focus All My Strength’ On Keeping Borders Open)
“If you take a lot of immigrants from the Middle East, you also import terrorism, crime, anti semitism and homophobia,” Orban told Bild. “In Hungary we don’t have ghettos. No areas wheree you don’t want to go. No scenes like the ones in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. The images from Cologne left a deep impression on us Hungarians.”
Hungary is one of the largest beneficiaries of money from the European Union. The country that funds most of it is Germany. Orban still doesn’t feel he has an obligation to compromise with Merkel on refugees.
“We don’t owe Germany anything and Germany doesn’t owe us anything,” he said. “Germany supported us in our negotiations [to join EU] and we opened our market for all of Europe. We’re even.”
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