Orbán discusses Hungarian-German ties, migration, EP campaign in Welt am Sonntag

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has addressed Hungarian-German relations and his government’s European Parliament election campaign focusing on migration in an interview to Welt am Sonntag.

Orbán said the blot on otherwise “excellent” Hungarian-German relations was due to differences in their respective approaches to the issue of migration.

“We insist on the right of nations to defend themselves, whereas Germany has a different philosophy,” he told the conservative paper in the interview published on Sunday.

The European Commission should be stripped of migration as a policy area, the prime minister said. Instead, a new professional body under the authority of Schengen-zone interior ministers should take over that responsibility, he added.

Meanwhile, commenting on the government’s current billboard campaign depicting European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and related criticism by the European People’s Party, Orbán said its northern members were closer to French President Emmanuel Macron than to the German Christian Democratic Union.

“Sadly, [the issue of] migration has sharpened differences here, too”.

Orbán insisted that the EPP, if it wanted to win in central Europe, must declare that “Juncker is the past” and Manfred Weber, the EPP’s spitzenkandidat, “the future”.

The prime minister characterised Juncker as a “nice man” for whom he harboured no animosity, but “any attempt” to exclude Fidesz from EPP was his “personal disloyalty”, and “no one can expect us to accept this disloyalty, even if it is the disloyalty of a kind man”.