French populist National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen has launched a campaign against the new European Union migration and asylum pact, stating it will lead to the “suicide” of Europe.
The new proposal by the European Commission to radically reform the bloc’s asylum policies away from the previous Dublin agreement was put forward at the end of last month and, according to Le Pen, could see as many as 60 to 70 million migrants settling in the EU in the coming years.
“It is an organized plan for the submersion of Europe and the nations that make it up,” Le Pen said Friday at the RN headquarters in the city of Nanterre, broadcaster TV5Monde reports.
Le Pen went on to state that the new pact “will cause the ruin of our social systems, an increase in unemployment, a housing crisis, an increase in delinquency and communitarian conflicts, the advance of Islamism and terrorist risks and the questioning of the values of our civilization.”
She slammed the European Union, stating that it had “entrusted the keys to the Middle East gate to Turkey, which is now blackmailing us in submersion. Today, it is about to open the doors of the House Europe on the Third World. Let’s take back the keys to Europe and France!”
Le Pen said that she, along with other members do the populist Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European Parliament, would be campaigning against the new migrant pact, and will launch a petition with the goal of getting around a million signatures.
The comments come after the Visegrád group of Central European nations — Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland — also spoke out against the new pact in late September.
“‘Allocation’ or ‘quota’, to change the name, is not enough. Hungary is against it. The basic approach is still unchanged. They [the Commission] would like to manage migration, and not to stop the migrants. The Hungarian position is stop the migrants,” Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said.
“We have to stop migration and the quotas and relocation. These rules are not acceptable for us,” Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš added.
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