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Five Reasons Migrants Are Desperate To Leave Hungary

Five Reasons Migrants Are Desperate To Leave Hungary
Aubrey Allegretti
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Euronews

Hungary has grabbed the headlines in recent days, for scenes almost unprecedented in the migrant crisis that is gripping Europe.

Police closed the capital city's main rail station after hundreds of undocumented travellers, many of them refugees fleeing war-torn home nations, tried to board trains bound for Germany.

Up to 2,000 of them were left camped outside Budapest's Keleti station, waiting to be given permission to travel west - but many are asking why the migrants are desperate to leave Hungary, despite it being within the EU.

We've assembled your five need-to-know facts about why people who risked their lives to enter Europe are so determined to leave one of the countries many of them first enter the continent through.

5 reasons migrants are desperate to leave Hungary
It's treating them "inhumanely"(01 of05)
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A father of a migrants family is arrested by local police near the village of Roszke on the Hungarian-Serbian border

Hungary has built a 4-meter high, 110-mile long razor-wire barrier along its border with Serbia, one of the key points of entry to Europe, in a bid to deter and keep out desperate migrants.

Police there have been accused of treating refugees inhumanely, launching tear gas at them, refusing to administer aid to fainting parents who have trecked for 12 hours or more with their children and detaining those entering the country in cramped, uncomfortable conditions.

“This is just unacceptable. You have people collapsing at the door of Europe without receiving any help. It’s a desperate situation,” Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the UNHCR, told The Telegraph at the Hungarian border crossing. (credit:Getty Images)
Citizens are hostile towards refugees(02 of05)
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A state-funded poster that reads: "If you come to Hungary, you cannot take the jobs of Hungarians!"

While as little as 3% of Hungarians considered immigration a 'key issue' in a survey commissioned at the end of 2014 – a year when Hungary received over 40,000 asylum applications – the Republikon Institute just this week found that 66% of the country's population believe that “the refugees pose a danger to Hungary and therefore they shouldn’t be allowed” into the country.

A mere 19% agreed that “it is the duty of Hungary to accept migrants”. (credit:AFP Photo/Attila Kisbenedek)
And the politicians aren't much better either(03 of05)
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Pictured: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

“Would we like our children to grow up in a United European Caliphate?” Antal Rogan, parliament caucus leader for the ruling Fidesz party, is on record asking Hungarian press this week. “My answer to that is no.”

His is just one of many voices in Hungary's governing political party to employ vehment anti-refugee rhetoric. Viktor Orbán, the country's prime minister, recently launched a powerful anti-immigration manifesto which equated desperate migrants with terrorists, said that immigrants were taking the jobs of native citizens and recommends putting them in so-called 'internment work camps' to extract forced labour.

“This refugee crisis very much plays into the xenophobic politics of the governing Fidesz party, and the even more xenophobic politics of its right-wing challenger, the Jobbik party,” Mitchell Orenstein, a professor of Central and Eastern European Politics at the University of Pennsylvania told Al Jazeera. (credit:KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images)
One far-right group is yapping at their heels(04 of05)
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Protesters demonstrate outside Holborn Tube station in central London, where Gabor Vona, leader of Hungary's far-right Jobbik party, had planned to speak at a rally.

By the end of 2014 governing Fidesz lost almost one-third of its voters, handing the reigns of official opposition to far-right party Jobbik. They achieved 20% of the popular vote in that year's parliamentary election and would reach up to 28% if another ballot were called tomorrow, according to opinion polls. (credit:JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images)
Other European countries are much more welcoming(05 of05)
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Volunteers distribute food to migrants coming from Budapest at the main station in Munich

In light of the anti-migrant and anti-refugee rhetoric employed by some Hungarian politicians, many would rather head to places like Germany, where the Chancellor there, Angela Merkel, has been far more forthcoming in her welcoming of those fleeing destitution.

Though eggs were thrown by anti-refugee demonstrators when she visited a shelter attacked by far-right protesters in eastern Germany, Merkel stood in front of people holding placards calling her the "people's traitor".

“There can be no tolerance of those who question the dignity of other people,” she said on 26 August. “There is no tolerance of those who are not ready to help, where, for legal and humanitarian reasons, help is due.” (credit:Matthias Schrader/AP)

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