Hungary’s rightwing government has claimed on a website that supports its upcoming anti-migrant quota referendum that there are 900 “no-go zones” in London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin.
The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has refused to participate in the EU’s quota plan to relocate 160,000 migrants across the continent, calling it an abuse of power. In typically robust style, last year he said: “In three years we might not know whether we are in London, Paris or Budapest.”
A referendum to be held in the autumn will ask: “Do you want the EU to prescribe the mandatory relocation of non-Hungarian citizens to Hungary without the approval of the Hungarian parliament?”
The government page entitled “We say no to mandatory migrant quotas” defines the 900 “no-go zones” as “neighbourhoods not under control, or hardly kept under control”, where “the norms of the host society … barely prevail”.
When asked to name the areas of London considered off-limits, government spokesman Zoltán Kovács told the Guardian: “Everything is based on publicly available data and sources.”
However, the Hungarian state ministry mainly cited blogs and conspiracy websites as evidence.
According to the government, 751 of the “no-go zones” are in France. The ministry quoted a 2006 blog post about France’s zones urbaines sensibles (Sensitive Urban Zones) by the academic Daniel Pipes, who is said to have first used the phrase “no-go zone” to apply to neighbourhoods with high immigrant populations.
However Pipes, an academic best known for claiming the US president, Barack Obama, was a practising Muslim, later retracted this statement after visiting France. “Having this first-hand experience, I regret having translated what the French government terms zones urbaines sensibles as no-go zones,” he wrote in 2013.
Other evidence presented by the ministry included an American’s blog on Sweden with a dead link to a map of 55 “hot zones” identified by the Swedish police, who, the blogger adds, do not in fact use the term “no-go zones”. It also named the trendy Berlin district of Neukölln as a “no-go zone”.
The ministry also sent as supporting evidence a Daily Telegraph article about the Brussels district of Molenbeek in the wake of the November terrorist attacks in Paris.
The official government web page, which went live on Wednesday, also features sections including “The Compulsory Resettlement Quota Increases Terror Risk” and “The Compulsory Resettlement Quota Threatens Our Culture”, and a ticking clock supposedly representing a migrant entering Europe every 12 seconds. However, according to official Hungarian police statistics, that figure inflates the current reality on the Hungarian border by over 6,000%.