Islamic migrant masses who receive "migrant visas" in EU embassies, which are also equipped with anonymous "migrants bank cards" and are channeled to Europe by an EU socialist commission that discriminates against Christians and seeks "population exchange" - such conspiracy theories usually spread right-wing extremists. They are also found in pamphlets by right-wing terrorists such as Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik.

But now the head of government of an EU member state accuses the Brussels Commission of implementing such a scenario: Hungary's PM Viktor Orbán. Although he had recently promised not to run anti-EU campaigns anymore. But his latest attack on the EU was the prelude to his campaign for the European elections late last week.

Addressing members of his Fidesz party, Orbán said that the election was about nothing less than the survival or demise of Christian European civilization.

Orbán warns of the church pulpit

On May 26, decide whether Europe remains a place of Europeans or whether the "continent of exchange" gives the continent "the masses of another culture from another civilization". European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called Orbán a "first-rate socialist", the "Brussels bureaucracy" a "bubble" and "virtual world of the privileged European elite".

Shortly thereafter, at a consecration from the pulpit, he warned of those forces in Europe who would negate Christianity. Finally, this week he portrayed Islam as the cause of a "civilization crisis" that Europe is experiencing right now - on the occasion of the reopening of a Hungarian Islam and Middle East research institute.

A seven-point plan - with many distorted representations

Against the fall of the West, Hungary's Prime Minister draws with a seven-point plan in the election campaign. In it he demands of the EU, among other things, the "return of the right to migration management" to the individual nation states, the abolition of "migrants bank cards" and "migrant visas" and an end to discrimination against Christians in Europe.

The individual points are either false premises or contain abstrusely distorted representations:

  • Almost all competences in border protection, immigration and refugee policy are up to now in the hands of the member states; the EU does not have a common refugee policy.
  • The rumor of many hundreds of euros filled "anonymous migrants prepaid bank cards" haunted for months by right-wing and far-right Internet forums.
    In fact, it is a program implemented entirely in Greece for some 50,000 refugees so far, who receive their monthly financial aid on a special bank card linked to a mandatory declaration. This is not anonymous, can not be used outside of Greece, the callable amounts are 150 euros per person per month and up to 550 euros for families with children.
  • "Migrant visas", which are issued in EU embassies to refugees, there is not - just a voluntary takeover program through which particularly vulnerable refugees from non-EU countries can travel after extensive testing in an EU host state.
  • Also, discrimination based on a commitment to a religion is not allowed in the EU.

A detailed request by SPIEGEL to the Hungarian Government on the individual points was answered by the Secretary of State for Communications, Zoltán Kovács, with a complaint about Western media who "have been operating a disinformation campaign against Hungary for nine years".

EU does not comment on Hungarian campaign campaign

Kovács claims, contrary to the facts, that there are "anonymous migrants bank cards". As evidence of discrimination against Christians in the EU, he lists several cases:

  • including the Islamist assassination of the priest Jacques Hamel 2016
  • and the retouching of crosses on packaging by the discounter Lidl.

On "migrant visas" Kovács restricts after all, the EU plans to "introduce them in the long term".

EU spokeswoman on migration, Tove Ernst, does not want to comment on Orbán's latest anti-EU campaign against SPIEGEL - "we're not commenting on election campaigns," she says. However, she referred to an EU fact check on Orbán's allegations that had been put together several weeks ago.