Deal on refugees coming soon, says Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban

EU and Turkish leaders may soon announce a behind-the-scenes agreement to resettle 400,000 to 500,000 Syrian refugees directly from Turkey to the EU, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has said.

Orban has locked horns with EU partners for years over economic policy, political freedoms and recently the handling of the refugee crisis, in which the Hungarian leader took a hard line and erected a steel fence along the country’s southern border to keep out migrants.

Hungary has firmly resisted the idea of resettlement quotas to distribute more evenly the refugees, most of whom wanted to go to Germany or Sweden.

Speaking to a meeting of Hungarian leaders in Budapest, Orban said he expected intense pressure from Europe to accept some part of those half a million refugees, something he said Budapest could not do.

He said the agreement has already been floated at a recent EU summit in Malta but was abandoned and not included in the EU-Turkey agreements signed at the weekend after its proponents could not gather the necessary support for it.