It is clear that the European Union has failed with the responses it has provided to handle the immigration crisis because they were based on the idea of the quota, the minister told Hungarian news agency MTI, and that has become a total failure, which everyone now clearly recognises.
“It would seem that the European Commission alone wants to maintain this idea and their latest plan is also based on the idea of a quota. We reject this, because the quota is a proposal that is totally at odds with common sense,” the minister said. We shouldn’t be thinking about a quota but about protecting our external borders because a quota will only make the crisis more serious instead of alleviating it, he said. This is something that we should make absolutely clear to all of Europe via the Visegrád Group’s common sense policies, he added.
Regarding the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw, Minister Szijjártó stressed the importance of the Visegrád Group's solidarity with Europe and, accordingly, the possibility of the V4 (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) sending a joint military force to the Baltic region. According to the plan, the V4 countries would each deploy a company of troops to the region in quarterly shifts.
Concerning energy security, the minister said that unilateral energy dependency is present to an even greater extent in central Europe than it is in western Europe. The situation is made more serious by the fact that the north-south infrastructure network still hasn’t been realised. One of the reasons is that some of Hungary’s neighbors haven’t fulfilled their formal commitments, and the other is that the European Commission has not been successful in pushing through the related agreements, Minister Szijjártó added.