Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said the partnership between the European Union and Turkey must be "closer than ever" to boost the continent's physical and energy security and improve its ailing competitiveness.
After meeting his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, on Friday, Minister Szijjártó said Turkey's weight in the world was larger than ever in the “new geopolitical and world economic era”, and the country was key to the physical and energy security of Hungary and the whole of Europe. “As with its politics Brussels is constantly increasing migration pressure on our southern border, it is highly important that Turkey should mitigate it,” he said, according to a statement by the foreign ministry. “Should Turkey not take border protection seriously, should it not keep some million migrants there, the pressure on the external borders of the EU, and so on Hungary, would become unbearable,” he said. Minister Szijjártó praised Ankara’s migrant policy, noting the financial burden posed by related border protection measures. “We can understand this problem because we have also spent several hundreds of billions of forints on border protection, and got only 1 percent of it reimbursed by the EU,” the foreign minister said.