Billionaire open borders advocate George Soros has said that the European Union (EU) is having an “existential crisis” and that member states must “set aside their national interests” to save the bloc.

“The EU is in an existential crisis. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong,” the 87-year-old Hungarian-American speculator told the audience of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Annual Council Meeting in Paris on Tuesday.

During his speech – entitled “How to Save Europe” – the founder of the progressive Open Society Foundations said that he “personally regarded the European Union as the embodiment of the idea of the Open Society” and that the crisis-hit EU needs to “reinvent itself”.

“Harsh reality may force member states to set aside their national interests in the interest of preserving the European Union,” Soros said, explaining that in order to “save Europe”, the bloc needs a “large upsurge of grass-roots pro-European initiatives” which he and his OSF “will do everything in our power to help support”.

At what appears to be a swipe at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who opened the doors of Europe to over 1.5 million Middle Eastern and African migrants in 2015 and pushed for the EU’s funding allocation of member states to be linked to accepting refugees, Soros claimed that the redistribution scheme should never have been forced.

Soros Pledges Renewed Fight Against ‘Dominant Ideology’ of Nationalism, Says EU ‘on Verge of Breakdown’ https://t.co/2YOJPTxl9U — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 15, 2018

” I have always advocated that the allocation of refugees within Europe should be entirely voluntary,” Soros said. “Member states should not be forced to accept refugees they don’t want and refugees should not be forced to settle in countries where they don’t want to go.”

This is despite Soros publishing an article in September 2015 entitled “George Soros: Here’s my plan to solve the asylum chaos” where the open borders advocate said that “the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly.”

Soros appears to be attempting to regain lost ground in his favoured globalist project after several populist victories saw Hungary, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Austria reject mass migration and the ‘ever closer union’ of the EU – the reclamation of national sovereignty by the free peoples of Europe starting with Brexit, which he called Tuesday a “territorial disintegration”.

‘Caught Red Handed’: Soros-Funded Body Lobbying Germany to Put Pressure on Hungary https://t.co/e6DnZe0N0u — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 20, 2018

The billionaire progressive has also seen a setback in Hungary with her rejection of the “Soros Plan” and the EU’s forced redistribution of migrants – a policy overwhelmingly rejected by other Central European Viségrad nations.

Breitbart London reported in May that the OSF confirmed it would move its Budapest office to Berlin, and Soros’s Central European University, also based in the Hungarian capital, was considering a move to Vienna in response to conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s “repressive” crackdown on foreign-funded pressure groups.

On Tuesday, Orbán’s government confirmed that it had submitted its “Stop Soros” legislative package which would criminalise the organisation of illegal migration – affecting many Soros-backed civil society groups operating in the country.

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