Fidesz will have fewer MEPs in the EP, but Orbán sees the EP election as a victory

Before and during the EP elections, Fidesz openly attacked the Brussels leadership and prepared for a decisive election, but this does not seem to have worked. The numbers show that Fidesz is still the strongest party in Hungary, but it has not delivered the massive change that the Orbán government tried to send out with all its communication, and it has gained two seats less than in 2019. Here is Viktor Orbán’s speech in reaction to yesterday’s results

Orbán: ‘We have won two elections’

Hungary held two elections on Sunday, and “we have won both”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said early on Monday, at the ballot-watching event of the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democrat parties.

Turnout was around 57 percent at the EP and local elections on Sunday, “another nice record”, Orbán said. “Democracy is alive and well, thank you,” he added.

“Additionally, we have won important victories in a war situation, amid hard battles,” he said.

Orbán congratulated Romania’s ethnic Hungarian RMDSZ party for reaching the 5 percent European parliamentary threshold “in a deadly fight”.

Orbán: ‘The people have said they want peace’

The people of Hungary “have sent a clear message that they want peace”, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, leader of the ruling Fidesz party, said, reacting to the results of the European parliamentary election after midnight.

Speaking at the ruling parties’ ballot-watch at the Balna Centre on the Pest side of the River Danube, Orban said the “political message” of the EP elections was that Hungarians made it clear that they chose peace over war.

Orban said the election result reinforced the government’s pro-peace policy, vowing that the government would use the mandate given to it by voters to “redouble its efforts to keep Hungary out of the war”.

“To sum up the results of the European parliamentary election, we can send a telegram to Brussels that reads ‘Migration stop, gender stop, war stop, Soros stop, Brussels stop,'” Orban said.

Meanwhile, referring to the opposition Momentum Movement’s 2017 campaign to hold a Budapest referendum on hosting the Olympics, Orban said: “God has a sense of humour, because it is in the year of the Paris Olympics that He wrote Momentum out of Hungarian history.”

Follow here the EP and local elections in Hungary: the most important happenings

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