PM Orbán: 2026 will be the last election before the war in Hungary

The general elections in 2026 will be “the last election before the war in Hungary, the last chance to decide on war and peace,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview broadcast on the Patriota YouTube channel on Monday evening, adding: “electing a pro-peace government will bring peace, electing a pro-Brussels one will bring war.”

Brussels wants to overthrow “national government”, says Orbán

In the interview, Viktor Orbán said that Brussels believed that war with Russia was inevitable and even desirable. “They think in terms of a war economy, a war logic, while we are pro-peace,” he said. He emphasized that next year’s election would be “both special and not special”, because nothing will change in terms of Brussels’ desire to “overthrow the national government” in 2018 and 2022.

• Zelenskyy willing to hold elections in wartime, but Russia already has its answer prepared

“They tried in 2018, in 2022 they came up with Peter Márki-Zay, the opposition coalition, which didn’t work, now they’ve pushed the opposition parties aside, created a new one, pulled another person out of the hat who is essentially the same …” he said, referring to the Tisza Party and Peter Magyar.

Speaking about the expected farmers’ protest in Brussels, he said rural people and those making a living in agriculture in Europe had had their complaints and grievances for long. He said that the protest was mainly triggered by the fact that the EU summit will discuss the European Union’s next seven-year budget, and farmers see that their money is being “cut.” The European Union wants to spend much less money on agriculture and rural areas in the next seven years than it has done so far, he said.

• Orbán sidelined: Sanctions no longer need Hungary’s approval under new EU emergency mechanism

Money goes to Ukraine

The prime minister said that ten percent of the total amount of the next seven-year budget would be taken up by repayments to the financial fund set up after the coronavirus, and that decision-makers also wanted to give money to Ukraine, with a total of 20 percent of the budget being allocated to this, including direct and indirect instruments.

This would leave 70 percent compared to previous years, of which they want to spend proportionally much more on defense, but this means that less will be left for rural development, he said. Farmers say that this is out of the question, he said, adding that there may be new goals, and Ukraine may need money, but it should not come from the pockets of farmers.

• Wizz Air plans major expansion in war-torn country: here’s when flights restart

Orbán said the protest would be the opening event of a very serious wave of agricultural protests lasting several years.

Frozen assets

In response to the suggestion that some would like to use the frozen Russian assets to take out loans, he said that the EU regularly uses monies as collateral and distributes the loans rather than directly distributing the funds themselves, with the result that “in the end, someone will have to pay off the loans, and that someone will be our children and grandchildren.” In fact, what the EU is doing now is nothing more than indebting European children and grandchildren for decades to come, he said.

“They support this because they believe that the greater the common debt, the closer cooperation within the EU can be, and if the debt is shared, the member states will have less and less power, and a United States of Europe will be created,” he said. Orbán insisted that there was a secondary motive behind the war, “because war is the best excuse to indebt the entire continent, thereby eliminating the independence of nations and creating a United States of Europe, which is the long-held dream of federalists.”

Taxes and Tisza

Asked about the “Tisza package,” Orbán said that the EU was currently waiting for the member states’ parliaments to decide whether to give the money to Brussels so that it can go to Ukraine.

“That is why they always have a candidate … who, if he wins, will do what Brussels demands,” he said. He added that the aim is to eliminate national players. While national parliaments were still making the decisions, “there will come a time when so much debt has been incurred that it will no longer matter what the Hungarian parliament does.”

“European bureaucracy will reach into national budgets and say that you have to pay this, no matter what you think about it,” he said. At that point, national parliaments would slowly lose their significance, he said. “That’s what it’s all about, that’s what the story of the construction of this empire is about,” he said.

In the interview, Orbán also spoke about the need to prevent the confiscation of the Russian assets frozen abroad and their transfer to Ukraine, and if this fails, then “we have to somehow stay out of it,” “most of all we should stay out of Russian retaliation”.