A little over a month after the failed referendum on compulsory refugee quotas, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, was defeated again on Tuesday 8 November because Hungarian parliamentarians did not back his planned amendment to the country’s constitution to ban the European refugee sharing programme.
The prime minister announced the amendment despite the fact that the 2 October referendum was ruled unlawful due to low turnout. On Tuesday 8 November, Orban failed by two votes, which the far-right party, Jobbik, refused to grant because it wants to ban any migrants at all from coming to Hungary, including those with money who can buy residence permits, reports Hungarian media.
The amendment was endorsed by 131 of the 199 parliamentarians, but required two more votes to reach the two-thirds majority needed. The amendment’s aim was to make unlawful under Hungarian law the relocation of refugees in Hungary. As a precondition for voting for the amendment, Jobbik required the government to scrap a system that has allowed rich non-EU foreigners to buy residence permits since 2013, but the prime minister rejected this demand.
In Brussels, the Commission pointed out on Tuesday lunchtime that the relocation of 106,000 asylum-seekers, rejected by Budapest, was supposed to take place over two years, which rules out infringement proceedings against Hungary at the moment. Commission spokesperson Mina Andreeva said that relocations had speeded up recently. The latest figures available show that on 7 November, 6,925 relocations of asylum-seekers had taken place since the end of 2015, including 5,376 from Greece. Hungary has not yet accepted a single asylum-seeker. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)