Viktor Orbán: It’s in Hungary’s interest for Turkey to release migrants to Syria

It’s in the interest of Hungary for Turkey to move migrants into Syria rather than letting them flood into Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said during an interview on public radio.

Turkey, which currently hosts close to three and a half million migrants, has threatened several times in the past few months to ‘open the gates’ and ‘flood’ Europe with migrants if the EU fails to assist them in handling the situation.

During his weekly interview slot on Kossuth Radio on Friday morning, the Hungarian Prime Minister said that there are two directions the migrants can head – Europe or Syria. Before they can be sent back to their homeland, the region must be stabilized, Orbán continued, before referencing the safe zone that Erdogan plans to set up in northern Syria.

Orbán added that if Turkey decides to ‘open the gates to Europe’, hundreds of thousands of migrants would rush into Greece, before making their way up through the Balkans to eventually arrive at the doorstep of the EU – the  Hungarian and Croatian borders.

“It is in Hungary’s basic interest that this does not happen,” Orbán said. “One Röszke was enough,” he added, referring to violent clashes that occurred in 2015 between border guards and migrants camped out on the Serbian side of the Röszke border crossing.

During the interview, Orbán also commented on Turkey’s recent military incursion into northeast Syria.

The United States and Turkey have “made an agreement”, so “we have no further foreign policy task here… other than agreeing with the two largest military powers of NATO.”

Later in the interview, Orbán addressed Hungary’s recent municipal elections where his party, Fidesz, suffered losses in several key cities, including the capital city of Budapest.

The Hungarian PM stated that he “regretted” that voters had backed opposition mayors in many of the localities.

Budapest’s former mayor Istvan Taros, of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, is set to be replaced by Gregely Karacsony, a leftist candidate.

Karacsony has pledged to enact several changes in the Hungarian capital. One of his top priorities is to ask George Soros’s Central European University to remain in Budapest.