One week after urging Bulgaria and Macedonia to raise a wall along the border with Greece to check the migrant flow, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban paid a visit to Bulgaria. In Sofia he invited Prime Minister Boyko Borissov to take part in the meeting of the Visegrad group (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) on 15 February, convened with the aim of formulating a common position that the group plans to uphold just a few days later, at the European Council meeting on migration. Orban made it clear he was expecting Bulgaria’s cooperation.

PM Borissov heard out Orban’s arguments with understanding. Under the two prime ministers, Bulgaria and Hungary were among the first countries to have raised fences along the borders with their neighbours, in the face of criticism, and now hold similar positions that only differ in minor details. It was no coincidence that after his meeting with Orban, Borissov repeated his thesis that Europe must close its external borders to immigrants immediately, until the time when the position of all migrants already on its territory has been regularized. And he did so with full conviction, adding that having upheld this position at several European councils where no one had heeded it, now Finland, Sweden and other countries were turning immigrants back.

But Borissov himself stated there was one major difference between himself and Orban – that the Hungarian Prime Minister had acted with more firmness and had quickly put up fences around his country. This difference would, without doubt, be even more discernible in light of to the idea of creating a back-up border system on the Bulgaria-Macedonia line. And this is so because Prime Minister Borissov is hardly likely to pluck up enough courage to put up a fence along the border with Greece, which unlike Turkey, is a member of the EU and Schengen. But there are other rational arguments in favour of refraining from such a step. Building walls along borders is not an idea that goes down well in EU. The EU countries which are currently exercising control along the union’s internal borders are doing so by putting in place security measures and not by putting up walls. Along Greece’s borders the EU has put in place a collective FRONTEX mission to check the migration flow, a mission Bulgaria itself is involved in. FRONTEX has been policing the region of the island of Lesbos by ship, as well as by way of land operations involving border surveillance and experts engaged in establishing nationality and taking fingerprints. After the EU took steps to restrict the migrant flow via the Western Balkans last year, in October FRONTEX warned Bulgaria to prepare for a new inflow of refugees, this time coming in from Turkey.

During his visit to Sofia, Hungary’s Prime Minister expressed his country’s full support for Bulgaria’s bid to join the Schengen area. As Viktor Orban put it, the EU was applying double standards, Brussels should acknowledge that Bulgaria is coping with the refugee crisis most efficiently and if Europe wanted to be fair, it should offer Bulgaria Schengen membership, if Bulgaria agreed to become part of a dying institution. Despite all problems the Schengen area is currently facing, Bulgaria continues to state its interest in joining it, but the truth is it is not being allowed inside because of problems with corruption and supremacy of law, not because of the way it is guarding the EU’s outer borders. The latest European Commission report on progress in Bulgaria in the sphere of justice and home affairs comes as confirmation of these reservations; a wall along the border with a Schengen country such as Greece would only add one more opponent to Bulgaria’s entry into Schengen.

English version: Milena Daynova