Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s press statement after a joint border inspection with Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš
22 September 2021, Röszke

Good afternoon to you all. I’d like to welcome members of the Hungarian and Czech press. First, I’d like to tell the Czechs that where you’re standing now is the Hungarian-Serbian border. This is a border section of 175 kilometres which we protect on its entire length with a fence. After that comes the Croatian border, which is 400 kilometres long. We protect that border section, too, half of it with such physical obstacles. On this border section in just a few months in 2015, more than 400,000 people entered without any kind of paperwork or permission. It was nothing short of an invasion, young men in the vast majority, claiming that they were invited to Germany by Angela Merkel. It was an attack on an enormous scale. Those who live here have the worst memories of this period; public security became almost untenable, conditions became unbearable, and then we decided to build this fence. And we built the fence in just three months. As you see, this is not an enormous structure. What is on the other side was our first  fence of defence, and this one is  fixed, the second one, but it’s a fence equipped with information technology, and it clearly shows that if one wants to, one is able to protect the border. In the European Union today, it is the will not the ability that’s missing for the protection of our borders. We protect this border section with 4,500 people. This is one of our largest items of expenditure in the budget of the police. We don’t receive any special help from the EU, only that which all other Member States receive; they’ve given us money neither for the fence nor for protection by live forces. We’re happy to have the Prime Minister here, and I’m happy to also have Czech journalists here who can see for themselves that this protects the security of the Czech Republic as well. This is also your border as it is an external Schengen border. We’re not asking for money, but we could do with some soldiers and police officers. And  I would also like to say thank you to the Czech people. When we were at the height of trouble, we received assistance in the form of many soldiers from the V4 countries and also from the Czech Republic. That was great help, both political and physical support. I told the Prime Minister that the Afghans will be here soon. Also today, we have apprehended around 300 illegal border-crossers, and most of them are already from Afghanistan; those who are now leaving Afghanistan will try to get in via this border. Pressure will increase, we need help, and we’re happy to accept the Prime Minister’s offer to provide assistance should the need arise again. Serbia is on the other side of the fence. This fence shouldn’t be here. Serbia should be a member of the EU, Serbia should be a member of the Schengen Area, and we should defend ourselves not here, at the Serbian-Hungarian border, but down in the South. That we were compelled to build a fence here is the responsibility of the European Union and Brussels bureaucrats. If they cared not only for their comfortable lives, but also understood security, they should have admitted Serbia a long time ago, and then we would all be in much greater security; Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs and those living in the interior of Europe alike. I’d like to thank the Prime Minister one more time for having come to visit us.

Thank you for the assistance so far, and we look forward to more.