Prague, March 20 (CTK) – Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek has said he backs the EU and free movement of people, but that economic inequality between states that weakens trust in the EU must be dealt with, in reaction to how Monday’s issue of Hospodarske noviny (HN) presented an interview with him.
“I resolutely protest against the [article’s] headline ‘Let’s restrict free movement in the EU’. It is completely misleading. I have never said we should restore borders. My words targeted the labour force, not the regular movement of citizens,” Zaoralek (Social Democrats, CSSD) wrote in a press release.
“The minister did not really say the sentence ‘Let’s restrict free movement in the Union’ in the interview, but he spoke about a limitation of the free movement of the workforce. At the editorial board of Hospodarske noviny, we comprehend the EU citizens’ free movement as being composed of free travel across the border and free movement of the workforce. We comprehended the restriction or regulation of free movement of the workforce as a partial limitation of the free movement of EU citizens and we used the headline which HN frontpaged today,” HN editor-in-chief Martin Jasminsky told CTK.
“If someone got the impression that border controls should be resumed, we apologise to Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek and readers,” Jasminsky said.
He said Zaoralek spoke about the free movement of the workforce.
“It ensued from his answers that he supports the idea of a limitation or – as he puts it – regulation of the labour market in the interest of maintaining the EU,” Jasminsky said.
In connection with Brexit, HN quotes Zaoralek as saying that to an extent, it has been provoked by the presence of two million foreigners in Britain, who were stripping the British of work and drawing welfare benefits.
“I only pointed out that we have to reasonably regulate the movement of the workforce, fight the cheap work policy. The free movement of people is a basic principle of the EU, but we must consider ways to regulate the labour market and fight social dumping so that the single market do not harm the EU citizens,” Zaoralek wrote in the press release.
“I am not flatly opposed to labour migration. Ukraine can serve as an example of this – we offer programmes of employing qualified workers whom we will guarantee the wages that are usual [in the Czech Republic] in their respective professions. However, I am opposed to the import of the cheap labour, to the employment [of foreigners] via [labour] agencies that exploit employees coming from the East,” Zaoralek said.
“We are against such workforce migration, which lowers the price of labour and creates social problems at places where the foreign workforce concentrates,” Zaoralek wrote.
He wrote that he wants to open a discussion on whether it is tenable in the long term for the state not to be allowed to define the conditions specifying the regulation of the employment of citizens from other EU countries.
This does not mean that the Czech government is changing its foreign political priorities, Zaoralek said.
In the past, the Czech government repeatedly emphasised that after Brexit, the Czech citizens’ conditions in Britain must remain unchanged.
Zaoralek said he wants an EU reform in order to preserve economic growth and freedoms.
“For the Czech Republic, the EU is of vital importance. Mere bilateral relations would be disadvantageous to us,” he emphasised.
