Hungary prime minister banks on anti-refugee vote to defy EU ‘elite’

BUDAPEST / AFP

Hungary’s populist strongman Viktor Orban was banking on voters on Sunday to defy the European Union and reject its troubled refugee quota plan, but low turnout threatened to taint his camp’s expected referendum win.
Surveys showed the referendum turnout might not reach the required 50-percent threshold and therefore be deemed invalid.
But Orban has already downplayed the political significance of the eventual turnout and said there would be “legal consequences” regardless of the outcome.
Orban’s right-wing government has led an expensive media offensive urging the eight-million-strong electorate to spurn the EU’s migrant quota deal, which wants to share migrants around the 28 member states via mandatory quotas without the consent of national parliaments.
“A valid referendum is always better than an invalid one, but the legal consequences will be the same,” he said on Sunday.
“There is only one condition for this: that there are more ‘No’ votes than ‘Yes’ votes.”
The firebrand leader has emerged as the standard-bearer of those opposed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open-door” policy, in the wake of the bloc’s worst migration crisis since 1945.
Polling stations opened at 0400 GMT and close at 1700 GMT, with results expected later in the evening. By 5.30 pm (1530 GMT), turnout was just below 40 percent, according to the national election office.
Opposition parties and rights groups had called on Hungarians to boycott the referendum or spoil their ballot.
“I am European so I cast my vote but I spoilt it because I don’t believe in this government. I want control of the migrant flow but not in this way,” a hotel owner in Budapest.

‘Dangerous game’
The EU migrant quota proposal — spearheaded by Germany and approved by most EU governments last year after antagonistic debates — seeks to ease pressure on frontline countries Italy and Greece, where most migrants enter the EU.
But implementation has been slow. Eastern and central European nations are vehemently opposed to the plan aimed at relocating 160,000 people, many having fled war in Syria.
Even as Hungarians voted, neighbouring Austria’s Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said the EU should stop clinging to its troubled plan.
“The target is totally unrealistic,” he told the German daily Welt am Sonntag, warning that disagreements over the plan could threaten “the cohesion of the entire European Union”.
Hungary has not accepted a single one of the 1,294 refugees allocated to it under the scheme and instead joined Slovakia in filing a legal challenge against it.
The referendum threatens to further split the quarrelling bloc, already weakened by Britain’s decision in June to leave the union — a decision Orban has blamed on the EU’s handling of the migrant crisis. European Parliament president Martin Schulz warned on Sunday that Hungary was playing “a dangerous game”.
To cement his power at home, Orban “plays with the EU’s founding principle: he questions Europe’s legal basis — which Hungary was involved in creating,” Schulz told German media.

‘Brussels elite’
The referendum asks voters: “Do you want the EU to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?”
In an editorial, Orban warned on Saturday that Hungarians had “a duty” to fight the failed “liberal methods” of the “Brussels elite”.
“It’s true that the campaign was exaggerated but no-one can tell me if these migrants really are refugees of war,” Zoltan, a 38-year-old lawyer and ‘No’ voter, said.
More than 400,000 refugees trekked through Hungary toward northern Europe in 2015 before Hungary sealed off its southern borders with razor wire in the autumn and brought in tough anti-migrant laws, reducing the flow to a trickle.
Other countries on the so-called Balkan migrant trail followed suit, leading to some 60,000 migrants now being stranded in Greece.
The EU said last week it hoped to relocate half of them by the end of 2017.

A deal struck in March with Ankara to halt the influx looks shaky in the wake of a coup attempt in Turkey in July.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere meanwhile said Sunday that Berlin wants to reinstate EU rules, suspended in 2011, which oblige asylum-seekers to be sent back to Greece as the first EU country they reached.

“We will take up discussions on this in a meeting with (EU) interior ministers” later in October, he told the Greek daily Kathimerini.
Germany wants asylum
seekers sent back to Greece
Germany wants to reinstate EU rules which oblige asylum seekers to be sent back to Greece as the first EU country they reached, its interior minister said on Sunday.
“I would like the Dublin convention to be applied again… we will take up discussions on this in a meeting with (EU) interior ministers” later in October, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the Greek daily Kathimerini.
The Dublin accord gives responsibility for asylum seekers’ application to the first country they reach — which put Greece on the frontline of more than a million migrants who
arrived in the EU last year.
The accord also says asylum seekers should be sent back to the first country they arrived in if they subsequently reach another EU state
before their case is examined.
A huge proportion of the migrants ended up in Germany.
But this clause was suspended for Greece in 2011 after the country lost an EU legal complaint which condemned the mistreatment of migrants seeking international protection.
“Since then, the EU has provided substantial support, not only financially,” to Greece to improve its asylum seeker procedures, the German minister said.
De Maiziere had already in August highlighted the need to reinstate the Dublin rules, provoking an outcry from Athens.
Greece stressed it was already coping with over 60,000 refugees and migrants blocked on its territory after countries further north on the so-called Balkan route closed their borders to the massive influx, notably fleeing the Syrian conflict.
De Maiziere said he was conscious of the “strong reactions” of Greeks, as well as the huge number of migrants being dealt with by Greece as an EU frontline state.
But “that doesn’t annul the need” to reinstate the Dublin rules, he said, stressing that “criticism of the convention not being applied keeps increasing in Germany.”
The minister, who has just revised the number of asylum seekers who arrived in Germany last year to 890,000 — down from a previous estimate of 1.1 million — reiterated Berlin’s commitment to taking its share of refugees who arrived in Greece and Italy in 2015 and the start of 2016.