PM Orbán: Ukraine war lost, battle for children against Pride marchers ongoing, Tisza supports Brussels

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said the government couldn’t stand by while supermarket chains “cashed in” on consumers and had to intervene to mitigate food price increases in a weekly interview on public radio on Friday.

Profit margins cap explained by Orbán: we could not sant by

Addressing a 10 percent government-mandated cap on profit margins on hundreds of basic food products at big supermarket chains in force from Monday, Orbán said the government had been forced to intervene, pointing to markups of 45 percent, 50 percent or even 129 percent. “That has nothing to do with market processes,” he added.

After the transition to a market economy, Orbán said Hungary’s supermarket chains had ended up under foreign ownership, adding that “they are only interested in profits”. Orbán noted that the government had negotiated with supermarket chains before rolling out the markup cap, but those talks had not yielded results.

• Read HERE why the Hungarian government believes the new scheme is a huge success

He said the measure had brought down the prices of around 760 food products. If that measure should not be enough to bring inflation down, “we have other instruments in store” to influence market trends, he added. “Not interfering with market trends each day reflects that Hungary has a business and market-friendly government, that seeks to ensure that the economy operates along its own logic … should the market derail for some reason, we need to put it back on track,” Orbán said. He also said he trusted that foreign chains in Hungary “will sooner or later realise that they cannot win against the government, they can only lose the battle.”

“Nobody questions an acceptable margin … there should be some margin and some profit on their side, but let 10 percent be enough,” the prime minister said.

VAT cut would only transfer money to multinational companies

Meanwhile, Orbán said those arguing for a VAT reduction were “either ignorant, young, or inexperienced”. The government had reduced the VAT on a number of food products to 5 percent, he said, adding, however, that “one third of the reduction resulted in lower prices, two thirds were absorbed by distributors, but … after a few months the prices were as high again”. “Young people in politics may not know this, but the old foxes — leftists, mostly — will know full well but they have always sided with the multinationals,” Orbán said. “A VAT cut always means transferring money to multinational companies,” he said.

Orbán about Pride

Concerning recent changes to the law on assembly, the prime minister said “in a normal case” the current assembly regulations and child protection could go together. “But not when sexuality — whether it is between partners of different or the same sex — is taken to the street or all kinds of gender activists would barge into schools and tell children, rather than parents telling them, what they should know about that extremely complicated part of life,” he said.

• HERE is our article about the acceptance of the new “Pride ban law” and how the parliament reacted, what happened on the streets

“Normal people such as we are, are now being constantly provoked because people with a non-traditional sexual behaviour, which they have the right to … will take that behaviour to the open disregarding the millions of children in the country,” Orbán said.

“We want them to see that freedom and child protection could go hand in hand; there is a place for freedom and raising children has its own ways,” the prime minister said, adding that “the ongoing debate in parliament is about whether or not the child comes first.” The government believes that the right to a healthy upbringing of children is a fundamental right, and this must be taken into consideration when exercising all fundamental rights, Orbán said.

Children come first, not Pride marchers

The government, he said, was now working on creating a legal status quo that will enable the authorities to determine whether or not “events like Pride can be organised out on the streets” based on the public assembly law, “or if the rights of our children come first and so there’s no place for this out in the open”. “The authorities are in a tight fit, because it is not clear what has precedence: freedom or licentiousness … Pride marchers or children,” he said. According to the government, “our children come first and everybody must adapt to that, and a clear legal situation must be created,” Orbán said.

Concerning the annual Pride events, Orbán said he had “always been concerned, as a father, as a Hungarian citizen … that such things could happen; in addition, I was prime minister and still it happened.” He added it was “an experiment of sexually re-conditioning society” and the government had been under “huge international pressure, which we could call a gender network, from Washington and Brussels at the same time”.

Battle for children

Hungary, he said, had not been in a position to “go against a hurricane”, adding, however, that the world had changed and “new winds are blowing in Washington”. He said the government would come into conflict with Brussels but would “have to endure this single-front battle”.

“We have to try and win this battle for the sake of our children,” Orbán said, adding that “there’s a greater chance for this than ever before”. He said the “changes in the US” had given the government the necessary room for manoeuvre “to try to enforce the simple human law that the child comes first, and then comes every other freedom…”

Orbán said his government had been working since 2010 to create a “family-friendly economy”, explaining that this was the reason behind the family tax breaks, personal income tax exemptions for mothers and the government’s “manhunt” against drug dealers.

Brussels has no business here

Commenting on Brussels’s criticism of the amendment to the public assembly law, Orbán said: “This is none of Brussels’s business.” He said that though Brussels had “got used to taking over national competencies from member states in recent years, and we’re fighting against this”. He said it was “obvious that the issue of the regulation of family life is clearly and exclusively a national competency”, adding that “Brussels has no business here.”