Hungarian minister afraid of a European superstate

An experiment to create a superstate appears to be under way in the European Union, the head of the prime minister’s office said on Saturday. Democratically elected national governments would get as little power as possible and Brussels institutions would get much more power than today, Gergely Gulyas told a summer university for law students in Vajta, in western Hungary.

Answering a question, he said an experiment of “uniformisation” is under way in areas including migration, gender, family policies and war affairs. He praised the EU for its common markets and for being borderless but added that “a bad mechanism had started” and “nine out of every ten EU decisions have detrimental effects on Hungary and to Europe”. Commenting on Hungary’s EU presidency in the second half of 2024, he said that the Hungarian government was the only one in Europe that had already been in power during an EU presidency in the past. Despite this, he said there was little chance that deep-cutting changes could be started, so the main goal is to make progress in matters already under way.

He said the reason that Hungary had not yet ratified Sweden’s NATO accession was that Swedes made “unfair and unreasonable accusation against Hungary” in recent years and these must be clarified first. Hungary has a vested interest in a strong NATO and it would only get stronger by integrating a country “with an economy like Sweden’s“.

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Commenting on the war in Ukraine, Gulyas said there was no realistic chance for Ukraine to regain the occupied territories and it clearly shows that Russia does not pose a threat to central Europe”. In order to achieve lasting peace, “the western world that supports Ukraine must give security guarantees to Russia but certainly no NATO membership to Ukraine”. In the long term, peacekeepers and numerous similar solutions could guarantee lasting peace in Ukraine, he added.