Hungarians voted in a referendum Sunday to support Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s policy of trying to keep migrants from war-torn countries to the east out of Hungary. The vote in favor was about 92 percent, but the 3.3 million who came to the polls were too few, representing 40 percent of registered voters; Hungarian law requires a 50 percent turnout for such a measure to become operative. Orban’s government has signaled its intent to go ahead anyway, in defiance of the law.

European Union planning anticipates Hungary accepting 1,294 migrants as its part from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. That is a tiny percentage of Hungary’s 10 million population. Instead, in addition to the anti-migrant referendum, Orban’s government has posed obstacles to accepting refugees. These include fences, a clampdown on the Hungarian press and resistance to the courts. The foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn, called for the expulsion of Hungary from the EU, saying that Hungary was treating asylum-seekers “worse than wild animals.”

There a supreme irony of the position of Orban’s government and the vote on Sunday. In 1956, the world responded quickly and sympathetically when Hungary’s own revolt against the Soviet Union resulted in some 188,000 Hungarians, 2 percent of the population at the time, fleeing the country. The United States, as one example, accepted and resettled some 35,000 of them.

Hungarians clearly have a right to express their opinions, including at the ballot box, but migration into Europe from the east and south is a European problem and they have an obligation to play a part in a European solution to it. EU popularity and leverage are slipping in general, in part because of the United Kingdom’s vote in June to leave. At the same time, over the 12 years it has been a member of the EU, Hungary has received an estimated $7.4 billion in development aid, with 95 percent of public investment in Hungary co-financed by the European Commission.

Hungarians need to recall their own recent history and remember that responsibilities go with benefits.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette