Better late than never. According to a Die Presse reporter, Viktor Orbán was right and deserves two apologies: One from former Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, who compared the Hungarian government to Hitler’s regime in how it handled the migrant crisis, and the other from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who today stands up for the protection of external borders but declared such action to be unenforceable back in 2015 and accused Orbán of being arrogant.
But not only Faymann and Merkel owe Orbán an apology. The infamous Luxembourg social democrat, Jean Asselborn, demanded the exclusion of Hungary from the EU at a time when Orbán took action against illegal migration, just as Greece is doing now. “Those who, like Hungary, build a fence against refugees should be temporarily or permanently excluded from the EU,” Asselborn said at the time.
As Zoltán Kovács, Secretary of State for International Communication and Relations, wrote in a tweet about the Die Presse article: “According to the author, the truth is that if Europe under German leadership had acted like Orbán in 2015, instead of condemning him, the EU would have been spared, for example, the rise of the far right, a dozen jihadist attacks and the enormous cost of the migration wave.”