At a press conference on Tuesday, October 8, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán praised France’s new interior minister, Bruno Letailault, for his recent stance on immigration policy, which has resulted in It was an unexpected move that could have been embarrassing.
Prime Minister Orban, who had previously criticized the European Commission’s record on migration and called for the immediate implementation of asylum “hotspots” outside the EU, unexpectedly expressed support for Bruno Letailault.
“I have a lot of respect for him,” he said.
The flirtatious wink was so surprising that I almost passed it by. However, the French Interior Minister’s “efforts” to influence immigration policy at the EU level are unlikely to go unnoticed by President Orbán.
In an unrecorded press conference in Strasbourg, the prime minister lamented that the EU “doesn’t have a common successful migration policy”, leaving member states such as Austria, Germany, Sweden and France to take individual responses. said.
In Paris, Bruno Letailault recently took a tough stance on immigration and vowed to take up the fight in Brussels.
He is due to appear before the Law and Home Affairs Council on Thursday (October 10), where he will push for an “ambitious and rapid” review of the repatriation directive, ministers told Euractic.
The cabinet did not respond to Orbán’s praise.
But having the support of a pro-Putin prime minister who is often described as a dictator is not good news for LeTaillou.
“Bruno Lutailot, you have the same kind of friendship as Europe’s worst dictator. The very person who taught you to despise the rule of law!” French S&D MP Chloe Liddell said Posted on social media platform X.
Just last week, Letailot took aim at the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers, a core tenet of the rule of law, arguing that they are “neither intangible nor sacred.”
“The source of the rule of law is democracy and a sovereign people,” he told the far-right weekly magazine Le Journal du Dimanche.
Meanwhile, the European Commission warned in its annual report on the rule of law published in July that Hungary “represents a real institutional problem in terms of the rule of law.”
(Edited by Martina Monti)
