INTERVIEW – Orbán: Europe at decisive turn, humanity entering a new era

Budapest (MTI) – Europe is going through a decisive turn and humanity is entering a new era involving slower and more difficult processes instead of the turning points of the past, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview with the Magyar Kurír Catholic news portal late on Saturday.

Economic tasks include maintaining competitiveness. The main question in professional preparedness is how an old type of approach could be replaced by contemporary knowledge based digital technology. Regarding social trends, he said it is necessary to tackle the issue of “whether we can reverse the demographic decline” or not.

Additional questions Orbán raised include whether religious communities can be saved or “individualism will spread everywhere” and what effects artificial intelligence experiments would have.

“These questions will be decided within our lives,” Orbán said.

Hungary has a political culture that allows open and sincere dialogue about every important issue. “Unfortunately, this is not the case anymore in some parts of Europe,” he added.

In response to a question about the deputy state secretary’s office set up in the Human Resources Ministry, he said Hungary will break with the former approach according to which any document prepared in Europe should only include ideologically neutral statements about people persecuted for their religion.

“Hungary is a Christian country so we must primarily help those that stand closest to us, and they are the Christians,” he said. “Our government is Christian-inspired and this results in certain government obligations,” he added.

He desribed the current situation in Europe as mass migration which involves more than refugees trying to leave crisis-stricken areas. The largest number of migrants flowing into western Europe are not from Syria but from Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the future, the largest problems will probably be caused by people from the inner parts of Africa, he said. This means that problems will not cease even if there is peace in Syria.

“I have responsibility to those that stand closest to me: my family, my friends, my community in faith and my nation,” he said. “There also exist circles of responsibility beyond that, and if I have the opportunity, I should help them, too, but not like the Pharisees,” he added. One-off, large aid schemes are not sufficient and “inviting masses of ill-fated people to our countries” would be impratical and even damaging, Orbán said.

Photo: MTI

Source: MTI