Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar has claimed to possess a confidential government resolution from the previous Orbán administration regarding a planned migrant reception centre, accusing the former prime minister of privately preparing to comply with the European Union’s Migration Pact while publicly claiming the opposite.
The prime minister raised the issue during a parliamentary debate after opposition MP Bence Rétvári accused the Tisza government of intending to allow illegal migrants into Hungary under the Migration Pact, the implementation deadline for which falls on 12 June. In response, Magyar directly accused the previous government of planning to build a migrant centre and promised to declassify the resolution.
‘You were literally planning to build a migrant camp in Vitnyéd using billions of forints. We have the secret government resolution, and we will present it. This is how you intended to comply with the Migration Pact,’ Magyar claimed.
The Origins of the Migrant Camp Controversy
The allegations relate to a controversy that first emerged in 2024 around Vitnyéd, a village of roughly 1,400 residents in Győr-Moson-Sopron County in north-western Hungary near the Austrian border. At the time, residents reported unusual activity at a former agricultural school complex in nearby Csermajor, a state-owned facility that had previously housed Ukrainian refugees. The installation of security fencing and the presence of police fuelled speculation that the government was preparing a migrant reception centre.
The claims quickly became a national political issue after media reports suggested that the facility could be converted into accommodation for several hundred migrants. Later reports, citing an alleged proposal by the Ministry of Interior, claimed that the Orbán government planned to spend around HUF five billion on the project.
Aerial footage of the former school complex:
Orbán and his government consistently denied the allegations. Former government commissioner Alpár Gyopáros insisted that the site was intended for other purposes and that reports about a migrant centre were entirely false.
Orbán also addressed the issue during an international press conference in September 2024. While denying that any migrant camp would be established in Vitnyéd, he acknowledged that the EU migration framework required Hungary to create accommodation capacity for several thousand migrants.
‘There will be no refugee camp in Vitnyéd, nor will there be any migrant camp anywhere in Hungary,’ Orbán said at the time. ‘The EU wrote into the Migration Pact that Hungary must create accommodation capacity for several thousand migrants. Today they want to force us to build migrant camps, while we do not want to build them,’ the former prime minister added.
Breaking the Long-Standing Narrative?
As the implementation deadline approaches, the Migration Pact and its so-called Solidarity Pool mechanism have become central issues in political debates across several EU member states, particularly in Hungary.
Opposition parties Fidesz, KDNP, and Our Homeland (Mi Hazánk) have accused the new government of accepting the pact as part of the political agreement reached between Prime Minister Magyar and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in May on the unblocking of €16.4 billion in previously frozen EU funding. Orbán has called on Magyar to disclose the contents of the agreement, accusing the Tisza Party of betraying Hungary’s anti-migration position and opening the door to illegal migration.
Last week, a demonstration against the Migration Pact drew several thousand participants in Budapest, including politicians from opposition parties. Protesters accused the government of abandoning Hungary’s long-standing restrictive migration policy.
The Tisza government and PM Magyar have categorically rejected those accusations, stating that Hungary would accept neither the relocation of asylum seekers to its territory nor the financial contribution option under the Solidarity Pool.
‘Theoretically speaking, the alleged Vitnyéd reception centre could count as a material or operational solidarity contribution under the Pact’
Instead, Magyar has repeatedly stated that the government would opt for the material contribution mechanism, including the provision of border-protection personnel and other technical assistance for deportation procedures, reception infrastructure and accommodation facilities, as well as financing or providing transport and logistical support to member states deemed by the European Commission to be under increased migratory pressure.
Theoretically speaking, the alleged Vitnyéd migrant reception centre could count as a material or operational solidarity contribution under the Pact, which—if the plans indeed existed—would suggest that the Orbán government had been preparing to align with the Pact in a manner similar to what Tisza is proposing today. That could fundamentally undermine Fidesz’s long-established narrative of opposing the Pact altogether, while shifting the political debate from whether Hungary should comply with the Pact at all to how it should comply.
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