Economic success ‘prerequisite’ for conservative policy, says Orbán in Rome

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, addressing a conference on conservatism in Rome on Tuesday, said economic success was a prerequisite for conservative policy.

Achieving economic success is the only way for nationally minded conservative and Christian democratic leaders to “survive”, Orbán told a podium discussion at the National Conservatism Conference.

But if a conservative political leader makes a mistake and economic indicators fall as a result, the leader “is murdered the next morning”, he added.

The prime minister said the Hungarian economy has been growing at a rate of 4-5 percent in recent years, adding that the unemployment rate had fallen to 3 percent with the public debt also shrinking.

Highlighting Hungary’s stability, he noted that

it was the only country in Europe not to have held early elections since 1990.

As regards Hungary’s conservative leadership, the prime minister said the main difference between the Hungarian government and other European conservative governments was that Hungary’s ruling parties were not under pressure to enter into a coalition with other parties, given their outright parliamentary majority. Another difference, he said, was the media landscape. Orbán said that

unlike in Hungary, 90 percent of the media in western Europe “belongs to the progressive liberals and only 10 percent belongs to the conservatives”.

Political affiliations are more balanced in the Hungarian media, he said, adding that this made him “the lucky one among European conservative politicians” who gets to speak his mind.

Commenting on accusations of populism levelled against his government, Orbán said that when he was young, a populist politician was someone who could not deliver on their promises, adding that keeping promises was about democracy rather than populism. Citing an example, the prime minister noted that his government had vowed to create one million new jobs over a ten-year period when it came to power in 2010 and has added 860,000 jobs to the economy over nine years.

Orbán also criticised liberalism, saying that liberal governments had failed twice within a single decade. The first failure, he said, came in 2008 when they had failed to properly address the economic crisis. The second was in 2015 “when they failed to protect their citizens and their countries’ borders” during the migration crisis. Orbán said

liberal democracy, which had served as the basic principle of liberal governments, had “come to an end in this sense”.

He called for liberalism to be replaced by “Christian democracy”.

On the topic of the migration crisis, Orbán insisted