Hungary's prime minister has said that the country is the first to prove that “migration, so far believed to be uncontrollable, can be controlled, stopped, and reversed”.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made the remarks during the oath-taking ceremony of 1,206 border police officers in Budapest’s Heroes Square, and said that “we have also been the first to demonstrate that we will not be forced to accommodate people whose identities or intentions we do not know”.
“We believe that the future of Europe is not planned in the center of an empire but in the capitals of European nation states; in Warsaw, Paris, Berlin, and in Budapest, too,” PM Orbán added. Should it happen otherwise, he suggested, “impoverishment and subordination” would follow.
Hungarians should also be the ones who make the decisions about the future of Hungary, PM Orbán said. He also argued that if the Hungarian government “allowed it to happen otherwise”, hundreds of thousands of migrants “would still be pouring through Hungary” and “anyone who declares themselves a refugee would still enter uncontrolled”.
Hungary did what “common sense and history dictated: it blocked the influx”; Hungary “did not wait for others or sought excuses, it did not shrink from criticism… but organized defense," the prime minister said.
PM Orbán also said that unless a country has border control and “brave border police” there will be “no welfare, security, order or development just uncertainty, fear, chaos, anger and trucks driving into the people."