Hungary’s house speaker: Brexit will make EU weaker

Budapest, June 25 (MTI) – Britain’s decision to leave the European Union will weaken the bloc and Hungary would have preferred a remain vote, Parliamentary Speaker László Kövér told MTI in an interview.

Kövér noted that the UK and the Visegrad Four grouping of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia agreed on a number of issues that had come up in debates on the EU’s future.

These debates are bound to continue in the future, too, but the opponents of a federal European Union will hold less political weight without Britain, he said.

Kövér attributed the victory of the Leave camp to British people feeling that Brussels is too unpredictable and has too much power in influencing their everyday lives. He said the EU had lost credibility in the eyes of British voters with its helplessness and inability to act on the migrant crisis.

But the House speaker ruled out the possibility of Britain’s exit prompting Hungary to reconsider its own future in the bloc. “Right now I think Hungary would have a much harder time outside the European Union. It would be a lot harder to continue building a civic Hungary.”

Kövér warned, however, that if the EU does not change its policies and ends up becoming an “elite club” in which Brussels bureaucrats and the political elite of the old member states have too much control over everyone else, Hungary may find itself in a situation in which staying in the EU would be detrimental to it. “But if the EU finds a change of direction then I don’t expect this question to come up anytime soon,” he said.