Europe must protect its culture from mass migration, warns Tusk

THE EU needs to protect its ‘cultural community’ from mass migration by imposing tougher border controls, Donald Tusk warned yesterday.

In a strongly-worded intervention, the European Council president said that further measures were needed because EU countries are ‘different from the outside world’.

The striking comments will be seen as an attempt to repair relations with countries such as Hungary and Poland, which have clashed with Brussels after taking a hard line on immigration.

His remarks came as Austria’s leaderin-waiting, Sebastian Kurz, 31, formally announced that he was starting coalition talks with the far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Nazis.

Addressing the European Parliament, Mr Tusk, the former prime minister of Poland, said: ‘We are a cultural community, which doesn’t mean that we are better or worse – we are simply different from the outside world.

‘Our openness and tolerance cannot mean walking away from protecting our heritage.’

He added: ‘We have the right and obligation to care for what distinguishes us from other cultures – not in order to be against someone, but to be ourselves. Without a feeling of superiority, but with a feeling of justified pride.’

While EU leaders have claimed recent ‘unity’ on key policy issues, the bloc is still in the midst of a crisis over how to deal with illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

The recent electoral success of far-Right parties in Germany and Austria has raised further concerns and caused leaders to rethink their approach.

Countries including the Czech Republic and Slovakia have also risked a row with Brussels by refusing to comply with a compulsory scheme to relocate refugees.

Mr Tusk said Brussels had a ‘duty’ to protect its external borders, adding that the huge migration in 2015 led to an awareness ‘of the need to defend our territory’. But in a thinly-veiled warning to hard-line leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, healso pointed at EU nondiscrimination rules and rules on the protection of human rights.

In Austria, the partnership between Mr Kurz’s People’s Party and the far-Right group could lead to the first neo-Nazi serving as an EU cabinet minister.

Despite supporting the Freedom Party’s hard-line on Islam and immigration, Mr Kurz yesterday said he would only enter a coalition that is pro-Europe.