V4 Stands Against North African and Middle Eastern Invasion

UPDATE 1.21.25: With Poland’s parliamentary power being transferred to the pro-EU globalist party, Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform, abbreviated: PO), the mission and effectiveness of the Visegrad 4 grouping is in doubt. In The Eurasia Daily Monitor, produced by the Jamestown Foundation, Janusz Bugajski explains the fractured state of the Visegrad Group:

On January 1, Poland took over the presidency of the Council of the European Union for six months (Council of the European Union, accessed January 2025). Its stated priorities are to strengthen all dimensions of European security, including boosting military capabilities, supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression, reinforcing EU borders, combating the “instrumentalization of migration,” and resisting foreign interference and disinformation (Notes from Poland, January 2). One of the bedrocks of Central European solidarity, the Visegrád Four Group (V4), however, has fractured since Russia’s extensive invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the government of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is pursuing more effective regional alliances to bolster Europe’s deterrents against a threatening Russia.

The V4, consisting of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, was established in February 1991 to enable these reemerging democracies to coordinate their policies (Visegrád Group, accessed January 2025). After achieving North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and EU membership, the V4 promoted joint initiatives in transportation, infrastructure, research and education, environmental protection, and collaboration with other international organizations. In recent years, major rifts have emerged between the V4 capitals, especially regarding their policies toward Russia. At the V4 summit in Prague in February 2024, the Polish and Czech prime ministers urged continued military support for Ukraine (Notes from Poland, February 27, 2024). Their Hungarian and Slovak counterparts, however, argued that they should push for “peace” and provide Russia with “security guarantees.” Tusk stated that there was no place for neutrality or negotiations with an aggressor state such as Russia. He directly confronted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by asserting that any country not supporting Ukraine was placing itself outside of NATO and the European Union.

During the Hungarian presidency of the European Union, which ended in December 2024, Orbán visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, claiming to be conducting peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Without any prior consultation with allies, this unilateral initiative was widely condemned for violating EU treaties (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 5, 2024). Relations between Poland and Hungary have now reached the lowest level in recent history, with Warsaw excluding Hungarian officials from the inauguration ceremony of Poland’s EU presidency on January 3 (Polska Agencja Prasowa, January 3). The dispute was compounded by Budapest’s decision to grant political asylum to fugitive former Polish Deputy Justice Minister Marcin Romanowski, who is wanted under a European arrest warrant. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski condemned Hungary’s decision as a “hostile act” (Rzeczpospolita, January 3).

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s government, formed in October 2023, is also an impediment to forging a coherent Central European security policy. Ukraine’s closure of Russia’s Gazprom natural gas pipeline to Slovakia on January 1 led to a further deterioration in relations between Bratislava and both Warsaw and Prague (Euronews, January 3). Despite several years of opportunity to seek alternative gas supplies, the Slovak government largely maintained its dependence on Moscow. In response to Kyiv’s move to terminate a major source of Russia’s revenues that fueled its war economy, Fico traveled to Moscow and threatened to cut off Ukraine’s electricity supplies from Slovakia (The Kyiv Independent, December 28, 2024). In response, Polish officials asserted that Warsaw was ready to increase its electricity sales to Ukraine if Bratislava followed through on its threat (Polska Agencja Prasowa, January 7).

With the withering of Visegrád, the Tusk government has focused on reinforcing NATO’s northeastern front and deepening relations with Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Finland and Sweden’s entry into NATO has provided significant weight to a nascent “Baltic bloc” and reinforces Poland’s relations with its northern neighbors, which include Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Poland has been invited as an observer to the Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8), a security grouping involving Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden. Tusk attended the NB8 summit in Stockholm on November 27–28, 2024, and signed a new strategic partnership with Sweden (Government of Sweden, November 29, 2024).

Read more here.

UPDATE 11.17.23: Poland’s nationalist ruling party has been defeated in its most recent election, and will soon be replaced by a new pro-EU globalist government run by Donald Tusk, a former Prime Minister of Poland and also former president of the European Council. Tusk and his minions want to undo the policies of the former government that prevented hordes of illegal immigrants entering into Poland and causing the same problems experienced by other European countries. Now, Tusk’s loyalists are aiming to imprison their opponents who stood up for Poland’s sovereignty. Thomas O’Reilly reports in The European Conservative:

Four Polish MEPs are potentially looking at up to three years in prison after the European Parliament stripped them of their immunity last week for liking and sharing posts on Facebook objecting to Islamic immigration.

The politicians, two of whom are from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and the others from the closely aligned Sovereign Poland (SP), are accused of spreading hate after sharing a video during the 2018 local elections warning about the emergence of “enclaves of Muslim refugees” in the country.

The MEPs in question are PiS’s Tomasz Piotr Poręba and Beata Mazurek, as well as SP’s Patryk Jaki and Beata Kempa. The move comes a month after Poland’s pro-EU opposition claimed victory in national elections.

Under EU law, MEPs maintain strict immunity from prosecution to prevent political intimidation. It can only be removed with the approval of the Parliament’s legal affairs committee, following a request from authorities in a member state.

The Left in Europe demand 3 years in prison for me for showing the truth about illegal migration.
Now the trial will start. I ask @elonmusk to defend freedom of speech on his platform and to support during the trial all people who do not want a world where you are put in jail… pic.twitter.com/XnEhSLTGtu

— Patryk Jaki – MEP (@PatrykJaki) November 10, 2023

This was just the latest swipe by Brussels at Warsaw’s governing conservatives. Last week, the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee had indeed recommended their immunity be lifted. The MEPs described the move as a politicised witch hunt influenced by Donald Tusk’s liberal Civil Platform party.

UPDATE 5.24.23: Poland has adopted tactics similar to those of Hungary in its battle against illegal migrants. Politico reports:

WARSAW — Poland is mulling setting up special camps where asylum seekers would be housed in containers and kept behind fences in the event of another migration crisis, according to the country’s interior minister.

“The thing is to be ready for such a situation in the form of places in which those waiting for deportation would be kept who may try to break the law,” Mariusz Błaszczak told Polish radio on Tuesday. “That’s all it entails. Besides, there are similar container camps in France and in Germany.”

It’s a very similar approach to one adopted by Hungary, which has come under fire from the EU for its harsh approach to asylum seekers.

The camps are part of an overhaul of the asylum system to restrict migration planned by the country’s Law and Justice party (PiS) government. It would allow border guards to detain asylum seekers for up to 28 days along the border while their applications are processed, “which will prevent efforts to illegally move to Western Europe.”

UPDATE 3.22.23: New Czech President Petr Pavel, a former NATO military committee chief, has said his country will cooperate more closely with Slovakia and Poland as part of the Visegrad group but not with Hungary. Euractiv reports:

Pavel, inaugurated as the Czech president on 9 March, visited Slovakia for his first official trip on Monday and is set to also visit Poland this week. He did not plan a trip to Hungary, the fourth country of the so-called Visegrad group.

“Nowadays, I see the Visegrad Four as more of a consultative forum without the ambition of detailed coordination of foreign or security policy, which is not what the group was intended for,” Pavel said after meeting his Slovak counterpart Zuzana Čaputová on Monday.

Pavel was critical towards the Visegrad group, particularly Hungary, even during the election campaign. His predecessor and the previous government considered the Visegrad Four to be key allies, especially in promoting national interests at the EU level.

But following the change in leadership, the Visegrad group has no more vocal supporters in Prague, though both the government and the president advocate for bilateral cooperation with Slovakia, Poland and the Baltic countries.

UPDATE 9.19.22: Relations between the members of the Visegrad four have been strained since the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, with Hungary remaining neutral or even slightly pro-Russia in the conflict, while Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia have chosen to strongly support Ukraine. Many analysts have wondered about the ability of the V4 nations to heal the rift between them. Poland’s Prime Minister opened the door recently to reconciliation. Robert Simonsen reports in The European Conservative:

Following six months of strained relations that came in the wake of the onset of the Russo-Ukraine War, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has voiced his desire to strengthen ties with Hungary and resume multilateral cooperation with the Central European countries of the Visegrád bloc.

The Polish prime minister’s statements, published earlier days ago in the weekly political news magazine Sieci, came in response to a question where he was asked if Poland’s friendship with Hungary had ended due to divergent responses to the Russo-Ukraine War, and whether there was any chance of unfreezing Visegrád Group activities, the Warsaw-based news outlet Do Rzeczy reports.

Speaking on Visegrád Group’s recent ideological split—with Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia on one side, fervently backing US, UK, and Brussels-led sanctions against Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine, and Hungary on the other, refusing to take part in either out of concern for its national interests—the Polish prime minister had this to say:

The attitude toward the war has indeed divided us strongly. But I think that in the course of time all the other issues in which we have shown solidarity, understanding, and support will bring us firmly back together. I would very much like that.

Morawiecki then underscored that the Visegrád Group—a cultural, economic, and political alliance that has allowed Central Europe to more forcefully assert its unique perspective and interests in the face of left-liberal dominance within the EU—has “enormously strengthened” its individual countries.

“That is why our group persists despite different governments, sometimes very different, in different countries,” he noted.

UPDATE 7.14.22: Slovakia has become the new rotating president of the Visegrad Four (V4) group, and given the differing stances on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine held by Hungary and the other members of the V4, the focus will be limited to internal cooperation. Lucia Yar reports for Euractiv that Slovakia will eschew foreign policy during its presidency of the group, to instead focus “on deepening regional cooperation in the development of transport, nuclear energy, low-carbon technologies, green and digital transformation, sustainability, youth mobility, and interpersonal relations.”

UPDATE 5.19.22: In Hungary today, the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is being held in Europe for the first time. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the leader of Hungary, one of the Visegrad Four nations, welcomed the American conservatives calling his country “the bastion of conservative Christian values in Europe.”

Orban discussed immigration and its effects in his speech saying “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations – migrants.”

Originally posted on September 17, 2019.

On the Defend Europa blog, an American ex-pat writing under the name Kasper, explains the Visegrad nations’ decision to “take action against the sustained North African and Middle Eastern migrant invasion of Europe.” As a result, notes Kasper, “Islamic terrorism is basically non-existent in these countries.” He writes (abridged):

Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia (The Visegrád Countries or V4) have long been part of a single civilisation sharing cultural and intellectual values and common roots in religious traditions, which they have continuously strived to strengthen and preserve. These countries are some of the only nations on the continent who’ve remained steadfast in their desire to hold on to their native Christian, European identities.

The current leader of the Visegrád group and current Prime minister of Hungary, Victor Orbán, has been a key figure opposing EU tyranny.

He dared to vocalise the thoughts of all thinking European’s when courageously said, “The question of the coming decade; will Europe belong to Europeans.”

Visegrád countries are bound together by the shared belief that Europe should first and foremost be for Europeans.

The Visegrád group nations encompass 65 million Europeans. Increasingly, the V4 is becoming the economic success stories of the European community. The economies of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary are all growing rapidly, and indeed are growing faster than any region in the world with the exception of the economies in the Asia Pacific.

Their growth is predominantly export-led and they are now becoming the go-to location for foreign direct investment in Europe.

Unlike its western European counterparts, security is one of the main priorities of the V4 governments. Islamic terrorism is basically non-existent in these countries. They’re the only European countries that have decided to take action against the sustained North African and Middle Eastern migrant invasion of Europe.

The Visegrád countries are providing an all-important alternative vision for Europe’s future that runs counter to that which has been thrusted upon the European people by unelected, pro-EU, globalist bureaucrats who sit in their ivory towers in Brussels.

Read more here.