House Speaker: With Western Balkans, EU would be stronger, with Ukraine, EU would be weaker
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The European Union should integrate the Western Balkans “if it wants to be stronger”, László Kövér, the Speaker of Parliament, said on Friday at the 11th conference of the speakers of South-Eastern European Countries, but it will allow Ukraine to join “if it wants to be weaker”.
Kövér likened the EU to a ship “hijacked and adrift” that could “still be saved”. “Change can happen on the captain’s bridge” and the current EU leadership replaced in 2024, he said, adding that new members from south-eastern European countries, not only “old” member states, would be needed “to carry out restoration work”.
Kövér said Hungary welcomed south-east European countries into the EU and would continue to provide political and professional support. The country’s EU presidency in the second half of 2024 would be an opportunity to actively contribute to the cause of integration, he said.
Some countries in the region have been membership candidates since 2005, and most since the beginning of the 2010s, he said. “The EU must appreciate those efforts.”
The EU, he said, needed the Western Balkans as much as the other way round but there were signs that some Eastern Partnership countries sought a political pact to join the EU, and in line with “Brussels double standards”, some would be integrated into the EU for political not professional reasons, Kövér said. Meanwhile, Western Balkans countries would be kept out of the EU for so-called professional reasons, he said.
It went against common sense, Kövér said, to pursue a “geopolitically highly risky” bid to integrate a war-torn region while holding back on a decision to integrate a geopolitically consolidated region where war is absent.
If the EU wanted to be stronger, it would integrate Western Balkans states, he said. “If it wanted to be weaker, then [it would integrate] Ukraine.”
He said the EU’s integration policy was more prone to destabilise rather than stabilise the bloc. The same went for its policies on illegal migration, sanctions in response to the Russia-Ukraine war, “the intention to systematically make the lives of EU farmers impossible”, its climate policy and the “aggressive promotion of the LGBTQ obsession”, he said, “not to mention the increasingly open undermining of member states’ sovereignty”.
The reality is the exact opposite of Oliver Varhelyi’s statement. Integration of Serbia into the EU would make Russia stronger for obvious reasons. The EU has no business bringing in another Russophile state into the EU to work for Moscow. Bringing in Ukraine would make the EU stronger by bringing a bulwark against Russian expansionism. Unfortunately what the Hungarian Fidesz government continues to do is sell out European interests to the Russians. The Hungarian government literally works for the Russia. At some future date Serbia could possibly join but not as it currently exists as a violent, mafia infested mini-Russia.