The Foreign Minister has said the European Union will not be successful on the global stage unless it makes a U-turn on its migration policy.
After meeting his EU counterparts in Luxembourg on Monday, Péter Szijjártó argued that stopping the inflow of migrants was crucial to ensuring Europe’s security and competitiveness.
Minister Szijjártó said the talks focused mainly on how to make the bloc’s common foreign and security policy more effective as well as on the EU’s global strategy. He said the EU should focus its efforts not on managing the process of migration but rather on stopping it. The EU must not give in to any kind of pressure that leads to the continent getting flooded with immigrants.
The Minister also said the bloc was taking too long to sign free trade deals with a number of important partners, adding that this was having a negative effect on its competitiveness. He said the approval of “socialist-type economic strategies” like proposals on tax harmonisation and the communitisation of taxation would also hamper the improvement of the EU’s competitiveness.
“These [proposals] would introduce socialism in the European Union, so we oppose them. We lived in a socialist dictatorship for a long time and we don’t want to see it come back,” he said.
Minister Szijjártó also warned against what he called the European Union‘s tendency to “lecture” its partners and member states, saying that if the bloc kept up this practice, it would be neither competitive nor safe. “Sooner or later everyone will have enough of Brussels wanting to tell others how they ought to live in the far reaches of the world,” he said.
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