Majorityrights News > Category: European Union

Visigrad Post, “Hungary’s PM Orbán: Nowhere Do Human Rights Prescribe National Suicide”, Jan 2017:

 

Hungary – The Hungarian government goes further in its opposition to non-European immigration, both illegal and legal. Viktor Orbán made again a strong speech against “national suicide” and meantime, the government announces its will to put an end to the residency bonds.

In front of 532 new deputy border guards, Viktor Orbán explained, on Thursday, January 12, that their job will be to protect Hungary’s borders and the safety of all Hungarians, “and that of all of Europe as well, as has been the fate of the nation for hundreds of years”.

“Terror attacks, riots, violence, crime, ethnic and cultural clashes all show us that those who come do not want to live our lives,” Orbán told the border guards. “They want to continue living their lives, just on the European standard of living. We understand them but we can’t let them into Europe. Nowhere do human rights prescribe national suicide.”

Asylum-seekers will be detained in close camps from now on

Systematic detention of migrants arriving in the country will be put in place, explained Viktor Orbán on Friday, January 13, during his weekly talk at the public radio. “We have reinstated alien police detention in the cases of those whose application to enter Europe has not yet been legally judged”. “As long as there is a verdict outstanding (in their asylum applications) they cannot move freely in Hungary,” said the Hungarian PM.

Under pressure from Brussels, the UN refugee agency and the European Court of Human Rights, Hungary in 2013 suspended the practice of detaining asylum applicants. The close camps are demanded by Jobbik’s vice-president and mayor of a little town at the border with Serbia, László Toroczkai, from the beginning of 2015, the same man that asked for the fence first in Hungary.

“Since then there have been terror acts in western Europe,” Orbán said Friday”. Any legal regulation that facilitates terror acts must be changed in the interests of our own self-defense.” He said he was aware that this “openly goes against the EU”, taking the risk of an open-conflict with Brussels, once again.

No more residency bonds

Three months ago, the constitutional bill against mandatory quotas of migrants, proposed by the ruling Fidesz, failed due to the surprise boycott of the vote by the right-wing populist party Jobbik, which wanted to add into the bill the suppression of the residency bonds. These bonds allow non-EU citizens to buy a Schengen permanent residency permit.

Really harsh discussions took place in the Hungarian parliament between the national-conservative ruling Fidesz and the right-wing populist Jobbik on these bonds. Security threats, suspicion of high corruption and treason toward the Hungarians — who reject non-European immigration — were the main arguments of the Jobbik.

Eventually, the government will suspend indefinitely the program, claiming these bonds are not necessary anymore since ratings agency Moody’s upgraded the country’s credit rating. Several scandals of corruption related to these bonds merged in 2016 and it is most likely that the government wanted to put an end to this failed program. Therefore, no more residency bonds requests will be accepted from April 1.

TNO, “African Violence Chases Away Paris Tourists”, 19 Jan 2017:

Criminal violence perpetrated by massed gangs of African invaders in Paris and Marseilles is driving foreign tourists away from France, with the number of Chinese tourists dropping by over half a million in one year, it has emerged.

       

According to a report in the French newspaper Le Parisien, the President of the Chinese Association of Travel Agencies in France, Jean-François Zhou, said that 2016 had been a “very bad year” for tourists from his country in France.

Zhou, who is also general manager of a travel agency and official representative of the Chinese tourist association Utour in France, said that “the scourge of criminality is especially aimed at Chinese tourists.”

“They are robbed at the palace of Versailles, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in front of their hotels, on the steps of buses . . . during high season, there is not a day that goes by without tourists being assaulted,” Zhou continued.

“I saw an 80-year-old man seriously injured because he was trying to resist the thieves. Women are pushed over, and as they fall, their bags are stolen.”

Zhou said the level of crime had created a “panic on Chinese social networks,” and that these reports had started to deter Chinese tourists since last year.

He explained that in 2016, about 1.6 million Chinese tourists came to Paris. This was a huge drop compared to 2015, when 2.2 million visited.

It is not only the Chinese who have stopped coming, but also the Japanese and Koreans, he added, pointing out that tourism from Japan had dropped 39 percent, and from Korea by 27 percent.

BBC, “Theresa May: UK will be a global leader on trade”, 19 Jan 2017:

Theresa May has told leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the UK will be a “world leader” on trade. But the prime minister also warned that inequality blamed on globalisation was aiding the “politics of division”. Her speech to business leaders and politicians in Switzerland comes after EU leaders said a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK would be “difficult”. The European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, Pierre Moscovici, said Brexit would be bad for the UK and the EU.
       
EU Commissioner for Economic & Financial Affairs, France’s Mr Moscovici, told BBC that Brexit was not a positive move.

Pierre Moscovici (French pronunciation: ​[piɛʁ.mɔs.kɔ.vi.si]; born September 16, 1957) is a French politician currently serving as the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs. Previously he served as a senior French politician, as Minister of Finance from 2012 to 2014 and as Minister for European Affairs between 1997 and 2002.

Previously a member of the Trotskyist group the Revolutionary Communist League, Moscovici joined the French Socialist Party (PS) in 1984 and has since been a member of the Departmental Council of Doubs and the French and European Parliaments.

Early life and education

Born in Paris, he is the son of the influential Romanian-Jewish social psychologist Serge Moscovici and of the Polish-Jewish psychoanalyst Marie Bromberg-Moscovici.[1]

In the meantime, former UKIP treasurer, Andrew Reid, seems to have secured something out of the deal:

Oxford Mail, “Villagers in Dorchester-on-Thames, South Oxfordshire, are battling former UKIP treasurer and city lawyer Andrew Reid”, 19 Jan 2017:

VILLAGERS are fighting for freedom after a former UKIP treasurer a bought up vast swathes of beloved countryside and started fencing it off. Residents in Dorchester-on-Thames were shocked when city lawyer Andrew Reid bought the 845-acre Bishop’s Court Farm for £11m last year and started putting up barbed wire fences around fields where families have played and picnicked for generations.

The rolling patchwork of pastures, in the shadow of Wittenham Clumps hill on the banks of the Thames, includes the famous meadow by Day’s Lock where the World Pooh Sticks Championships were held for more than 30 years.

The previous owner of Bishop’s Court Farm, Anne Bowditch, had always been happy for villagers and visitors to tramp across her meadows, but she passed away in September 2015.

Mr Reid, senior partner at RMPI solicitors, bought the property last year through a company called Vision Residences (2) LLP.

The first many villagers knew about it was when spiked fences started shooting up across the fields in October.

       
A commentor on the article noted: “There was a famous photo taken in these fields years ago that was used in a genius plot by the British in WW2 to deceive the Germans (remember the floating “airman” who had invasion plans in his jacket). A photo of him with his “sweetheart” was planted on him - that photo was taken on Day’s Meadow.”

Theresa May, writing in the Daily Telegraph and in an interview by Sky News, has finally stated her government’s position on the Single Market and the Customs Union.  It is good news for Brexiteers, who have feared all along that she would buckle under pressure from the City and the dateline corporations:

Asked repeatedly whether Britain will leave the Single Market, the Prime Minister said that she will not try to “keep bits of membership”.

Her comments suggest that Britain is prepared to leave the Single Market and the Customs Union and apply for a good deal from outside after Brexit.

... Asked if she will prioritise immigration controls over Single Market access, Mrs May said: “We are leaving, we are coming out, we are not going to be a member of the EU any longer.

“We will have control of our borders, control of our laws, but we still want the best possible deal for UK companies to trade with and operate within the European Union and also European companies to trade with and operate within the UK.

“We mustn’t think about this as somehow we’re coming out of membership but we want to keep bits of membership. What we must say is what is the right relationship for a United Kingdom that is no longer a member of the European Union. The best possible deal for the UK will also be a good deal for the EU.

“I am ambitious for what we can get for the UK in terms of our relationship with the EU because I also think that’s going to be good for the EU.”

Nationalists might want to think ahead to the possibility - say around the time the Conservative Party Manifesto for the May 2020 election is published - that the logic of border control segues into that of talking about demographics and the need for Britain to remain identifiably British; thus opening the pandora’s box of assimilationism versus racial preservationism.  The age of mass immigration is drawing to a close.  That change will necessarily define and refine our discourse.  We need to be ready for it.

TNO, “Germany: 3,000 Sex Attack Victims in 2016”, 4 Jan 2016:

Third World invaders pretending to be refugees in Germany preyed upon 2,000 adults and 1,000 children in 2015, a new study by monitoring group XZ Einzefall has shown - at least 1,964 of the sex attacks were serious,

The true number of attacks and victims is much higher, because police are under orders to withhold hundreds of reports and only respond if the media makes inquiries.

XY Einzefall is a German-based monitoring group which has carefully recorded every sex assault carried out in Germany since Angela Merkel opened that country’s gates to the mass Third World invasion in 2015.

Their final report for 2016, which can be found in spreadsheet format here, reveals that reported incidents only total 1,964, consisting of at least 201 rapes, 1,559 sex attacks, and 204 sex attacks in public swimming pools.

Only incidents which were actually reported by the police, or which were reported in the controlled media, were added to the XZ Einzefall list. Their spreadsheet contains the links to the police and media reports.

Of the 201 reported rapes, at least 35 were minors, the study showed. Of the 1,559 sex attacks, 653 victims were minors, and of the 204 swimming pool sex attacks, 286 were minors.

This works out at nearly six serious sex attacks every day during 2016.

However, as XY Einzelfall points out in its study, these figures are merely the tip of the iceberg. Quoting a separate study in Austria, the groups said that “only a tiny fraction of all crimes are published as a police or media-report.”

The Austrian study quoted compared complaints laid with the police to those reported by the police’s media officers and those reported in the media. The difference was vast, the study said, finding that in Vienna, of the more than 200,000 complaints made to police, less than 2,000 police reports were actually published.

With regard to rape cases, the study found, of the 647 rapes reported to the police, only 15 were ever mentioned by police reports and media.

“For this reason,” the study says, “the total number of crimes committed by migrants is much higher.”

XZ Einzelfall also maintains an incident map which is regularly updated and which can be found here.

EUObserver, “The rise and shine of Visegrad”, 30 Dec 2016:

The Visegrad leaders have made their voices heard on the EU stage.
         
From left to right, Robert Fico, Beata Szydlo, Bohuslav Sobotka and Viktor Orban. (Photo: Czech government)

The name of a quiet medieval town in Hungary – Visegrad – has in recent times become synonymous with the word “rebellion” in Brussels.

Others, particularly if they are from one of the four countries in the loose association of the Visegrad Group, might argue that it stands for “alternative”.

  V4 countries are trying to weigh in on the EU’s soul-searching process which was launched at a summit in Bratislava in September. (Photo: Kurt Bauschardt)

The group, also known as V4, was formed in Visegrad in 1991 and is comprised of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. It has remained relatively obscure for almost 25 years.

Then the migration crisis hit.

The EU’s inability to handle the crisis, combined with a tilt in the power structure within the union after the Brexit vote and increasingly bellicose and eurosceptic leaders in Hungary and Poland, has thrust the group to the fore.

In 2016, V4 leaders have pushed for a change in the EU’s migration policy and has refused to accept asylum seekers under the EU’s quota system. They also called for reform of the EU after the Brexit vote.

“The V4 basically fulfilled the role it was created for in the first place, to be a powerful lobby organisation.” Daniel Bartha, the director of the Budapest-based Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy, told Euobserver.

“It now holds on to a significant number of votes in the European Council to offset Germany.”
The original sin

Diplomats refer to a meeting of interior ministers in September 2015, when the four states were out-voted on migrant quotas, as the “original sin” that emboldened the group.

The V4 countries disagreed with the mandatory part of the system - even though in the end Poland, under its previous government, did not vote with the rest of the Visegrad nations - and particularly disliked how the European Commission rammed through its German-inspired proposal.

A year after the migration quotas were introduced, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico declared the idea politically dead. “Quotas today clearly divide the EU, therefore I think they are politically finished,” he told journalists while his country was holding the rotating EU presidency.

Eastern EU states were not the only ones that did not like the quota system, but they were the most vocal about it, with Hungary and Slovakia challenging it in the EU Court of Justice.

Strong anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the Visegrad leaders was initially criticised, but eventually the focus of the EU’s migration policy shifted from taking in asylum seekers and distributing them fairly, to reinforcing border control and shutting down migration routes.

The issue has finally forced the realisation in the corridors of the Berlaymont, the EU commission’s headquarters, that V4 countries could not be ignored.

But as one EU official observed, commission president Jean-Claude Juncker still surrounds himself with a small circle of close aides and is less open to influence from the V4.

The official gave the example of the commission proposal on “posted workers”, which would require companies from the eastern EU to pay as much to their workers sent to Western Europe as their western counterparts.

In principle, the proposal makes sense in a single market, and some Western European states have long objected to easterners undercutting local wages. But 11 national parliaments objected to the commission’s proposal, the bulk of them eastern nations. The commission decided in July to move ahead with the proposal anyway.
After Brexit vote

The Brexit vote was a shock to the EU, but it reinforced the V4’s presence.

It has been interpreted as a vote against the ruling elite and mainstream politics, a public sentiment that Hungarian and Polish leaders have been successfully exploiting. Those two nations took it as a sign that the EU needs to change, and they were ready with an alternative.

“The European Commission hasn’t fully understood what happened in the British referendum,” Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo told reporters in July, when her country took over the V4 rotating presidency.

“The EU needs to return to its roots. We need to care more about the concerns of citizens and less about those of the institutions.”

Similarly, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban said in June that democratic legitimacy for the EU can only come from the member states.

“We have to return to the notion that the basis of the EU is not its institutions, but the member states. The democratic feature of the EU can only be reinforced through the member states,” he said after the British referendum.

There is yet a concrete proposal, but in the Slovak capital in September, the 27 member states kicked off a soul-searching “Bratislava process” to explore how the EU could be reformed to win back citizens, and the V4’s ideas are bound to be influential.

“After Brexit, the EU’s political centre of gravity has shifted towards the east,” said analyst Daniel Bartha.

“France has had a declining economy since the early 2010s, so it has been less potent in offsetting Germany’s dominance on the continent. New power centres are destined to emerge in the union.”

But the V4’s rise in EU politics might only be temporary, as many issues divide the four nations and would hamper their ability to influence EU politics.

“The harmony only exists from the outside. Migration is the key issue where the four agreed. On everything else – for instance energy – there is little agreement,” said Bartha.

He cited as an example relations with Russia – a friend to Hungary but still regarded as a threat in Poland.

And Slovakia’s government has largely muted its opposition to EU migration policy during its presidency of the EU Council.

EU officials have suggested engaging with the “more reasonable” elements within the V4 – Slovakia and the Czech Republic – to separate them from Poland and Hungary whenever possible.

“They need our gestures. It is that moment,” argued one EU official.

Iohannis stops accession of Muslim Prime Minister

Visigrad Post, “Romania On The Brink Of A Political Crisis”, 28 Dec 2016:

Romania – President Klaus Iohannis rejected the nomination of the country’s first ever Muslim – and woman – candidate for Prime Minister, Sevil Shhaideh.

After winning the election early December, the PSD – Social Democrats – had to nominate a candidate for the office of Prime Minister. The president of the PSD, Liviu Dragnea is unable to become Prime Minister as he has been preliminarily refused by President Iohannis as he has been convicted for electoral fraud. Hence, he proposed Sevil Shhaideh, and it was likely he’d run the government through her.

Although President Klaus Iohannis asked the Social Democrats to pick someone else to lead the government, but he did not give any reason for this rejection.

Mr Dragnea has previously suggested he will fight any attempt by the president to block his choice of Prime Minister. “If Iohannis rejects our proposal, I’m not going to make a second one. We’ll see each other in some other place,” he said.

                             
          Sevil Shhaideh - rejected nominee for Romania’ first ever Muslim – and woman - Prime Minister

Following the rejection, Mr Dragnea said he could begin the process of seeking to remove Mr Iohannis as president. “It seems the president clearly wants to be suspended,” Mr Dragnea said. “We’ll weigh our options very carefully, because we don’t want to take emotional decisions. We don’t want to trigger a political crisis for nothing, but if we come to the conclusion that the president must be suspended, I won’t hesitate.” As a matter of fact, several political observers claim that the two refusals – the first one, unofficial, of Dragnea, and the second one of Shhaideh – are unconstitutional.

On December 28, Mr Dragnea proposed Sorin Grindeanu as candidate for Prime Minister. President Iohannis is expected to name the Prime Minister on December 29. According to the Romanian constitution, if the candidate is not nominated by the President, the parliament will be dissolved and new elections will be held.

        President Iohannis is indeed going along with the nomination of Grindeanu -

Sofia Globe “Romanian president designates Grindeanu new prime minister”, 30 Dec 2016:
 
President Klaus Iohannis has designated veteran leftist Sorin Grindeanu as the new Romanian head of government. Previously, Iohannis refused to endorse a female, Muslim candidate who was criticized for her inexperience.

The 43-year-old Sorin Grindeanu would have 10 days to unveil his cabinet and seek the parliament’s vote of confidence after being named by Iohannis on Friday.

The process is expected to go smoothly for the former telecommunications minister after the triumph of his moderate left PSD party in the parliamentary election earlier this month. The PSD won 45 percent of the seats and now holds a firm majority with their junior partners, the ALDE.

Grindeanu is a mathematician who has served as deputy mayor of the western city of Timisoara.