Even Chancellor Merkel appeared now to be worrying about what she had set in motion. Both she and President Hollande of France pushed ahead with the only solution that could take some of the growing pressure off Germany. The two of them – with the European Commission – attempted to persuade every member of the EU to take in a quota of migrants. Yet from Britain to Hungary, the member states refused. One reason they did so was that they could see that the numbers they were being asked to take did not reflect the actual figures. The European Commission and Merkel were trying to persuade countries to sign up to a quota system that was already inadequate for dealing with the numbers which had already arrived.

Governments that were refusing to do the bidding of Merkel and the European Commission were also reflecting the will of their people. A solid two-thirds of Hungarians polled during this period felt that their government was doing the right thing in refusing to agree to quota numbers issued from Brussels or Berlin. And yet one of Hungary’s most famous sons disagreed. The billionaire financier George Soros spent considerable sums of money during 2015 on pressure groups and institutions making the case for open borders and free movement of migrants into and around Europe. As well as a website called ‘Welcome2EU’, his Open Society foundation published millions of leaflets informing migrants of what to do. These informed them of how to get into Europe, what their rights were once there, and what the authorities could and could not do. The group openly advocated ‘resistance against the European border regime’.

In October 2015 the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, criticised Soros publicly as one of a circle of activists who ‘support anything that weakens nation states’. Soros responded publicly to confirm that the numerous groups he was funding were indeed working for the ends described by Orbán. In an email to Bloomberg, Soros said that it was his foundation which was seeking to ‘uphold European values’, while he accused Orbán of trying to ‘undermine those values’. Soros went on to say of Orbán: ‘His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.’2 The dialogue ceased before anyone could ask Soros how long those European values might last once Europe could be walked into by people from all over the world.