Slavic Europe

While in Turin, Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said that Italy doesn’t take lessons from people such as the fours of the Visegrád Group, which includes Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, and whose leaders, headed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, sent him a letter calling in it to “close the ports” to asylum seekers. “We have the right to demand solidarity from our neighbours, countries with whom we share the European project”, Gentiloni said. “We don’t accept lessons, nor threatening words. We limit ourselves to serenely saying that we do our duty and we demand that Europe does it without giving dubious lessons”. And really any lessons from Mr. Orbán, whose “European” ambition to head a kind of slavic reactionary cartel too often induces him towards far-right radicalisations, are quite unacceptable. Why is Europe keeping to fund (so much) countries that refuse to accept refugees under the EU’s relocation policy?