Centrum Stosunków Międzynarodowych - 26 August 2016: Orbán’s “Fortress” Hungary begins to take shape

The Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán has spoken on the state radio announcing Hungary should place another “more massive” razor wire fence on its southern borders in case of migrants’ inflows will increase further in next months. This is just the last of a series of decisions the right-wing populist leader and the government have made after the European migrant crisis has deteriorated dramatically in 2015 and thousands of refugees left the Middle-East region to reach the EU coasts and borders.

Orbán’s concern regarding the sort of millions of defenceless refugees left to the mercy of weak EU-Ankara agreements. The Hungarian leader invoked a “greater need of security” in case Turkey will allow “several hundreds of thousands of people at the same time” to move to Europe. “If we can’t do it nicely, we have to hold them back by force,” Orbán said. After a first 177 km 4-metre-high fence was built along the borders with Serbia and Croatia in summer 2015, Budapest has tightened its intention of blocking refugee’s influx within the country. In addition, from July 5th 2016, immediate expulsion procedure entered into force for illegal immigrants nabbed within 8 kilometres from the Hungarian border.

Anti-immigrant demagogic propaganda has been conducting in the country since the crisis began and Hungarians seem to be supportive of this sentiment as the results of a questionnaire disseminated among the population in 2015 clearly shows. Countless declarations of several government’s exponents and of Orbán himself depict immigrants as “poison” or “not needed”: “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work, or the population to sustain itself, or for the country to have a future” adding that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk” (July, 2016). Of the same magnitude, in April 2015, was Orbán’s announce of an anti-immigration manifesto that equates migrants with terrorists, saying immigrants are taking Hungarians’ jobs, recommending internment camps for illegal immigrants and stating that they should be forced to work.

Although Eurostat 2015 data and the 2015 International Organisation for Migration (IOM) report on migration in Hungary clearly show how the foreign-born population in 2015 was just 145.968 out of roughly 9 million (1.5%), people perceive immigrants as a threat for the country cultural and social integrity. Traditionally, Hungary is a transit, source, and destination country of both regular and irregular migration. Its geographical location, EU membership and relative prosperity act as pull factors for migrants from neighbouring countries, including ethnic Hungarians, even though in this case it substantially stands as a transit country to Western Europe.

Orbán’s approach to immigration widely reflects the position of the other Eastern European countries such as Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland, which firmly reject the quota system proposed by Italian PM Matteo Renzi to the European Commission and approved by the Council in September 2015 outvoting the “Eastern” block. On June 5th, 2016, Budapest announced the date of October 2nd for a consultative referendum on whether Hungarian citizens should accept mandatory relocation and Brussels’ immigration policy, with easily predictable results.

Although according to the quota system 54.000 Hungarian refugees are expected to be relocated over the next two years and the initial mandatory quota from Italy and Greece to Hungary is only of 1294 people, Magyar government seems adamant. Indeed, actions are expected to become even stricter. As of August 2016, the state of play of the Member States' support to Emergency Relocation Mechanism is rather daunting: 1.011 people from Italy and 3.386 from Greece have been relocated out of 120.000 and only 12.990 places out on 160.000 have made available by European governments. Hungary has neither relocated nor accept a single refugee nor made any places available so far.

“Fortress” Hungary is much more real than it can seem.