On Wednesday evening, the two men attended the Euro-2024 match between Hungary and Germany in Stuttgart. It was the host country which won (2-0) to the great dismay of a football-loving Viktor Orban. Earlier, the Hungarian official had been received by the city’s mayor Frank Nopper and by Winfried Kretschmann, environmental leader of the Baden-Württemberg government.
Hungary, “an island of peace”
Viktor Orban criticized on Friday a completely transformed country, with “hundreds of thousands” of migrants benefiting, according to him, from the recent relaxation of the conditions for obtaining nationality. Once held as an example “for its hardworking people” and its “order”, it is now “a colorful and multicultural world”, which has “all kinds of effects” on society, he said.
He congratulated himself on having closed the door to refugees in 2015 and “preserving an island of peace” in Hungary, unlike Germany which then welcomed nearly a million people. Under the aegis of Viktor Orban, in power since 2010, the central European country has built fences at its borders and restricted the submission of asylum applications to embassies abroad while refusing to contribute to the solidarity mechanism between EU Member States.
Use of foreign workers
A policy which has already earned it several convictions from the Court of Justice of the EU, including a record fine of 200 million euros in mid-June. But faced with a shortage of labor caused by declining demographics, Hungary resorts to foreign workers.
