PM Orbán called Manfred Weber hungarophobic

Manfred Weber, the head of the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, leads “a pro-war, pro-migration, anti-economy coalition”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told Hungarian public radio in an interview in Berlin on Friday.

Orbán announced thousands of new jobs

Orbán also said the openness of the world economy was a key issue for Hungary.

The prime minister said the country’s current living standards could not be kept up “solely from the market provided by ten million Hungarians”. “Isolation from the rest of the world would be tragic,” he added.

Orbán, who is on a visit to Germany, said that country was an ally in striving for an open economy. “It is also a productive country that needs to sell its products around the world, so maintaining an open world economy is in its interest,” he added.

He cited automotive giant Mercedes-Benz as an example of the ties between Hungary and Germany. Orbán said the company was about to create 3,800-4,200 new jobs in Kecskemet, in central Hungary, to produce new models and their parts.

German industry is currently undergoing changes, he said, adding that “the question is whether or not Hungary will have a place in that technological change; and the answer is that yes, it will,” he said. A large part of those developments will be implemented in Hungary, creating thousands of jobs and taking a role in engineering and employee training in the process, Orbán said.

Orbán, Scholz to discuss great European issues

“That’s the first thing I will ensure with the Chancellor,” Orbán said, referring to talks scheduled with Olaf Scholz later on Friday.

Germany’s every chancellor “must give their seal of approval” for Hungarian-German cooperation, Orbán said, adding that the primary goal was to ensure Hungary had a role in German economic progress.

He said the Chancellor was an ally of Hungary in that both countries had an interest in an open economy and in pushing back against “forces in Europe that want the opposite”.

In view of Hungary’s upcoming EU presidency, Orbán said he and Scholz would discuss “great European issues too”, and “the issues Hungary wants to table and how far it wants to take them”. Those issues included Serbia’s EU integration, tax cuts, family subsidies, and improving European competitiveness, he said.

Meanwhile, Orbán said that as soon as the left wing had announced that they had made agreement at an informal EU summit this week, the EPP, “which calls itself right-wing but moves towards the left with every alliance”, joined them, agreeing on a programme “that isn’t good for Hungary and differs from the way Hungarians think.”

“This is a pro-war coalition that has banded together to speed up Europe’s slide into the war,” he said, adding that Germany was undergoing a level of militarisation unprecedented since the second world war.

Soros-plan again

Another programme of the coalition “is pro-migration; they are the ones implementing the Soros-plan”, he said, adding that American financier George Soros had said in 2015 that one million migrants should be brought into Europe every year, and that he would be happy to bankroll the project.

Orbán warned that Europe’s population was being replaced, with the number of white Christian Europeans dwindling as the number of Muslims was growing radically.

Regarding competitiveness, including issues such as boosting industry, creating more jobs, higher wages and better living standards, the European left-wing coalition “is on the side of tax rises, so it isn’t market-friendly, which isn’t good for the European economy”, he said. The coalition created “is pro-war, pro-migration and anti-economy”, he said.

Orbán said that rather than representing traditional, moderate, conservative and Christian democracy, the EPP was moving leftwards, hence a left-wing majority had formed in Europe.

Shift to the right happened

Orbán said the EPP had won the votes of moderate, right-wing voters in elections over the years but had gone on to form coalitions on the left, and so it was “pushing away” right-wing voters and “stealing” votes on the left, which he called “dishonorable”.

Even though the balance of public opinion had shifted to the right, this was not currently reflected in the power dynamics in Brussels, he said, adding however that “indirect measures” such as forming alliances and agreements on the right would make it “ever stronger”.

Orbán said the last few elections had presented a challenge to right-leaning Europeans, as many were reluctant to vote for the “robust and strengthening” right wing formed by Italian, French and Hungarian parties, among others.

More moderate Christian Democratic voters tended to vote for the EPP, he said.

The EP elections were conducted in nation states, he said, and had brought about a weakening of almost all non-right-wing governments, he added, pointing to the French and Belgian results as examples.

The shift to the right “has happened” but did not lead to a change in power because the EPP “always takes its voters towards left, leading to a left-wing rather than a right-wing majority in Europe”, he said.

Regarding the war in Ukraine, Orbán said the Western world, led by the United States, was trying to defeat Russia without getting directly involved in the conflict by “leaving it to the Ukrainians to fight the war”, once the Russian president, violating all principles of international law, had tried to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.