Eight years after the infamous words of former Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, who, during the peak of the 2015 migrant crisis, likened the Hungarian government’s border protection measures to the Nazi deportation of Jews in World War II and called Viktor Orbán’s actions “utterly unworthy of a 21st-century European leader”, Austria has finally come around to demanding the same measures. Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said in Bucharest on Wednesday that Romania and Austria should jointly put pressure on the European Commission (EC) to make the EU’s external borders more secure and to curb illegal migration.
The Austrian official, who vetoed Romania’s and Bulgaria’s accession to the Schengen zone last December, told reporters waiting outside the Interior Ministry in Bucharest that he expected the EC to support him at operational, financial, and legislative levels. He said that he would meet Romanian Interior Minister Lucian Bode to discuss the fight against people smuggling and illegal migration and to learn about the results of a pilot border management project launched by the EU in Romania.
Karner deflected questions on the expected date of Romania’s accession to Schengen, pointing out that the Schengen system must first be made operational.
Gerhard Karner Wikipedia
“The system is not working. It is not only Romania that controls the EU’s external borders: Germany also controls people entering at the Austrian border, and France does the same at the German border.
The common interest is to make the system work, with functioning external borders.
We have already taken the first steps, but there is still a lot to be done,” assessed the Austrian Interior Minister, who said that only a functioning external border protection can ensure unrestricted freedom of movement within the European Union.
In response to a journalist’s question about the fact that most illegal immigrants were heading for Germany but that it was not Germany that had prevented Romania and Bulgaria from joining the Schengen area, complaining about migratory pressure, Karner said that Austria had no external (Schengen) border, but that it had registered the highest number of asylum applications in the last year in terms of population – more than 110,000. He added that Europe’s security can only be guaranteed by securing its external borders.
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