Germany's former chancellor Helmut Kohl has emerged from retirement at the age of 86 to announce he is to meet Viktor Orban, apparently to offer the controversial Hungarian prime minister support for his stance opposing mass migration into the European Union.
Speaking in an interview published by the Sunday edition of the mass-circulation Bild newspaper to mark his birthday, Kohl ranged over a number of themes, sitting in a wheelchair speaking to Bild chief editor Kai Diekmann, a long-term confidant. Kohl did not divulge the details of the planned meeting, but it may be assumed that Orban will visit the former chancellor, who was in office through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent German reunification, at his home in Ludwigshafen-Oggersheim.
The meeting was widely seen as throwing down a challenge to Chancellor Angela Merkel, initially Kohl's protegee and later his nemesis during the CDU's donations scandal in the 1990s, over her immigration policies.
Orban is perhaps Merkel's sharpest critic within the EU on this issue, closing Hungary's southern borders to refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other crisis regions and presenting himself as the defender of Christian Europe. The Hungarian leader is seen as politically toxic by many Merkel supporters. The decision by Bavarian state leader Horst Seehofer - whose Christian Social Union (CSU) is a long-term coalition partner of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - to meet Orban in Budapest at the beginning of March was greeted with concern.
Seehofer and Orban both insisted they were not seeking to topple the German chancellor.
Now Kohl, a colossus of German and EU politics over his 17 years as chancellor up to 1988, is to meet the Hungarian leader whose democratic credentials have been questioned in Brussels over his attitudes to the press and his plans to alter his country's constitution. Kohl revealed during the interview that he had also received Croatian Foreign Minister Miro Kovac, another advocate of a more restrictive policy on migration. Although Kohl has long been out of active politics, he is still seen as a powerful voice within the CDU/CSU alliance, particularly on EU matters.
In the interview he praised Orban as a "European to the marrow," and he expressed unhappiness with the troubled relations between the Bavarian CSU and Merkel's CDU. Bild quoted a passage by Kohl to be included in a new book to be published on the occasion next month of the awarding of the Charlemagne Prize to Pope Francis in Aachen. "Lonely decisions, no matter how justified they may seem to the individual, and unilateral national actions have to be consigned to the past," he said in a clear sally at Merkel's decision on September 5 last year to open German borders to refugees stranded in Hungary.
"In the Europe of the 21st century they should not be a deliberate option, especially as the consequences will in general have to be borne jointly by our common European destiny," he continued. Many within Merkel's political camp believe she took the decision without adequate consultation with her political backing and see it as the start of her loss of control over German domestic affairs.