(Budapest) Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, visiting Berlin, denounced on Friday the harm in his eyes of mass immigration to Germany, “which no longer resembles” what it used to be.

“If I compare to the country ten years ago, the taste is no longer the same, the smell is no longer the same,” he said on Hungarian radio.

The nationalist leader, known for his anti-immigration positions, is due to meet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the afternoon, as Budapest takes over the rotating presidency of the EU in early July.

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.

Mr. 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.  

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.

Over the past four years, the number of extra-EU arrivals has doubled, from 35,000 at the start of 2019 to 78,000 in March 2024, mainly from Asia, according to official statistics.

“It’s a program that has nothing to do with immigration, they don’t stay with us long term,” noted Gergely Gulyas, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, last year.