Having finished construction of a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia, Hungary now plans to extend it to Romania. Tampering with the fence is punishable with prison or deportation.
These are its latest moves in a stand-off between the thousands of migrants trying to reach Europe through Hungarian territory.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said that this is a “German problem,“ not a ”European problem,” while leaders in western Europe talk about a shared responsibility.
Two very different responses to the crisis are emerging on each side of Europe. The west might be failing to handle the crisis well but the east is simply rejecting any role in it. Resentment is building on both sides and is threatening European unity.
United in Defiance
The leaders of the four so-called Visegrad countries—the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia—met in Prague in the first week of September to discuss the refugee crisis. There, they agreed to emphatically reject Angela Merkel’s call for a more even distribution of refugees and immigrants across the European Union.
Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico took the message to Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann a few days later at a meeting in Bratislava. Fico went further than Sobotka, saying that Slovakia would only accept refugees who would be willing to integrate fully into Slovak society. And since there are few such people, he suggested, there is no point in introducing compulsory quotas.
