68ers blamed for Brexit
July 1st, 2016Népszabadság contends that identifying the migrant crisis as the root cause of the Brexit vote is misleading. Magyar Idők disagrees.
In her Népszabadság’s opinion piece Ivett Körösi suggests the British leave vote has been affected by the issue of mass migration, but not at all the kind of immigration the Hungarian prime minister had in mind, when he interpreted the result of the referendum and encouraged people to turn out at Fidesz’s ‘quota referendum’ later this year (see BudaPost May 13th, 2016). British leave voters are in fact fed up with immigration from eastern Europe, ‘with people like us’, Körösi suggests, citing examples where eastern Europeans were told to pack up and leave the country at checkout counters in supermarkets, in schools, or on the bus in the UK after the referendum, because they were perceived as immigrants taking away jobs from British people.
Magyar Idők‘s analyst on the other hand, believes that the migrant crisis in Europe is one of the main reasons behind the British leave vote. István Attila Magyari points out that the 1957 Treaty of Rome was signed by ‘devout Christian’ politicians like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Alcide de Gasperi: the Europe they had in their dreams was the co-operation of sovereign, ‘Christian nation states’. Many of today’s European leaders are left-wing heirs to the ideas of the 1968 Paris riots, the author argues, and their ideal of a multicultural society has greatly contributed to the way the influx of migrants was handled in the EU. British voters have now shown a red card to the ‘anti-democratic’ leaders of the European Union, which is in urgent need of radical reform to prevent other countries from leaving. The EU should become, once again, a community of sovereign nation states, Magyari concludes.
Tags: immigration, referendum, UK