House speaker meets Slovak counterpart

Kover said in a press release that Slovakia and Hungary had similar views on the EU’s enlargement, migration and the future of the bloc, he said.

He slammed the EU’s treatment of south-eastern European candidates as “morally indefensible and unfair”, and called for the process to be sped up.

Hungary and Slovakia’s interests in “reforming the organisational and treaty system of the EU” are also similar, Kover said. “We insist that the EU remains an alliance of strong member states.”

The two countries will also oppose all “encroaching attempts” to strip member states of competencies, Kover said, citing mandatory resettlement quotas or scrapping unanimous decision-making as examples.

He called for further talks on cooperation “after the European parliamentary elections”. Slovakia is Hungary’s third largest trading partner, and the economic cooperation creates further fields of interest, he added.

Pellegrini praised the talks with Kover as “open and informal”, adding that both countries were protecting their sections of the Schengen borders against illegal migration. He thanked Hungary for its part in protecting Slovak airspace, and noted that Slovak policemen were working on the border between Hungary and Serbia.

Hungary and Slovakia are also on common ground in their opposition to the EU’s mandatory resettlement quotas for migrants, he said.

They have similar stances on the war in Ukraine, he added. Slovakia will not send soldiers to Ukraine “under any circumstances”, he said.

Slovakia also has a vested interest in a continued cooperation of the Visegrad countries, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, he said. The four countries together give 10 percent of the EU’s population, and so have a significant weight in Brussels, he said.