Parliament to debate whether to deploy troops to ‘protect Hungary and the EU’s border’ after police said they caught 2,533 people entering from Serbia

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Hungary is considering using the army to secure its southern border, where record numbers of migrants are trying to enter the European Union, many fleeing war in Syria.



Police said a record 2,533 migrants – most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan – were caught entering the country from Serbia on Tuesday. More may have passed unnoticed, walking through gaps in an unfinished barrier to a Europe groping for answers to its worst refugee crisis since the second world war.

Hungary, which is part of Europe’s Schengen passport-free travel zone, is building a fence along its 110-mile border with Serbia in a bid to keep out migrants.

Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said parliament would debate next week whether to deploy the army. He said: “Hungary’s government and national security cabinet ... has discussed the question of how the army could be used to help protect Hungary’s border and the EU’s border.”

The number of migrants travelling through the Balkans has soared in recent weeks, with 3,000 entering Macedonia daily from Greece. Embroiled in a debilitating economic crisis, Greece has taken to ferrying mainly Syrian migrants from its overwhelmed islands to Athens, from where they head north by bus. Fifty thousand arrived on Greek shores in July alone.

Serbia said about 10,000 migrants were passing through the country at any time, their stay lengthening as Hungary nears completion of the fence.

“The situation will get worse, when winter arrives. We’re getting ready to look after double that number,” the Serbian prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.