Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar and former prime minister Viktor Orbán clashed on Saturday, 13 June, over allegations that the previous Fidesz administration secretly planned to establish a migrant reception centre in the western Hungarian village of Vitnyéd while publicly denying any such intention and campaigning against the EU Migration Pact.
Magyar held an extraordinary press conference on Saturday, describing the affair as evidence of ‘one of the Orbán government’s biggest lies’ and presenting a series of internal government documents from 2024 that he said proved plans for a migrant reception centre had been actively prepared behind the scenes.
According to documents released by the government, internal discussions began shortly after the European Court of Justice (CJEU) imposed a €200 million fine on Hungary in June 2024, together with a daily penalty of €1 million over the country’s asylum policy. The material presented by Magyar included cabinet decisions, Interior Ministry documents, planning proposals, and budget estimates related to the Vitnyéd–Csermajor site.
The documents suggest that senior government officials repeatedly examined options for accommodating asylum seekers near the Austrian border. One August 2024 cabinet decision authorized the interior minister to carry out developments at the Vitnyéd property aimed at making it suitable for receiving refugees. Other documents referred to a reception facility with hundreds of places, renovation works, temporary container housing, sanitation infrastructure, and security arrangements.
A timeline presented during the press conference sought to demonstrate that the plans evolved over several months and reached the highest levels of government. According to the documents, the issue first appeared on the cabinet agenda shortly after the CJEU ruling of 13 June 2024 and was subsequently discussed at government meetings on 7 July, 25 July, 21 August, and 11 September. The timeline also highlighted an Interior Ministry coordination meeting on 30 August, the emergence of local media reports in early September, police guarding the site, public denials by Fidesz politicians, and a local demonstration against the project later that month.
Among the most politically sensitive documents presented by Magyar was a summary of a government meeting which concluded that ‘for 2026 it is necessary to escalate the political conflict related to migration’. The same discussions included decisions concerning the development of the Vitnyéd site and broader strategies for handling migration following the CJEU ruling.
‘For 2026 it is necessary to escalate the political conflict related to migration’
Magyar and the Tisza Party argue that the wording suggests Fidesz and Orbán intended to further politicize the issue and deliberately intensify tensions surrounding migration ahead of the 2026 parliamentary election in order to divert public attention from what they describe as more pressing concerns, including ‘widespread corruption’ and the ‘deteriorating state of public services’ in Hungary.
Magyar further stressed that the documents directly contradict public statements made by Fidesz politicians at the time. Throughout September 2024, government officials and local Fidesz politicians repeatedly denied reports that a migrant camp was being established in Vitnyéd.
Following the release of the documents, Magyar accused the previous government of deceiving the public. ‘The documents released today reveal that the Orbán government secretly built a migrant camp in Vitnyéd in 2024. They lied to the Hungarian people about everything,’ he wrote on social media. He also questioned why the plans had been concealed and who would take responsibility for what he described as a deliberate deception.
Fidesz and Orbán have strongly rejected the government’s interpretation of the documents, arguing that the plans never reflected a genuine intention to establish a migrant reception centre.
Arriving at Fidesz’s party congress on Saturday, former Minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office and Fidesz parliamentary group leader Gergely Gulyás insisted that the Orbán government had consistently opposed both the EU Migration Pact and migrant relocation. He argued that the Vitnyéd-related government decisions were merely a ‘tactical tool’ used during negotiations with Brussels in an attempt to have the migration-related penalties imposed on Hungary withdrawn.
According to Gulyás, the government never intended to actually construct the facility. He maintained that the plans formed part of a broader negotiating strategy with the European Union rather than preparations to accommodate migrants.
‘The plans formed part of a broader negotiating strategy with the European Union rather than preparations to accommodate migrants’
Orbán echoed a similar position during a press conference ahead of the Fidesz congress. Responding to the allegations, the former prime minister stated that ‘there is not a single migrant camp and not a single migrant in Hungary today’. He argued that such a facility could not exist because ‘the people decided this in a referendum’, referring to the 2016 referendum on the European Union’s migrant relocation quotas held in the aftermath of the 2015 migration crisis.
When asked about Gulyás’s assertion that the plans had effectively been designed to mislead Brussels, Orbán objected to that characterization. ‘Let’s not use the word deceive, let’s call it outmanoeuvring them,’ he said. He later added that ‘we should have outmanoeuvred them more often’.
The former prime minister further argued that if his government had genuinely wanted to establish a migrant camp, it would have done so. ‘If we had wanted to carry it out, we would have carried it out,’ Orbán said, adding that there are no migrants in Hungary today because ‘I did not let them in’.
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