PM Orbán: 3.7 million people voted against what Budapest Pride describes
In a television interview on Monday, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called Budapest Pride at the weekend “not pride, but prejudice”. In the interview with commercial broadcaster TV2, Orbán said, “Pride is a European political model controlled by Brussels.” If national sovereignty were not protected by the government, “then the same would be the case with migration and Ukraine”, he added.
3.7 million people said no on what “Pride describes”, says Orbán
Asked for his opinion on the weekend Pride march, Orban said he could not comment on it “with the credibility of an eyewitness” since he hadn’t been there. “What the heck would I have been doing there?” he said, adding that he agreed with those who did not consider the march “pride”. Hungarians gave their opinion on the issue in 2022 in the general election and in a referendum, when they had their say on sexuality for the sake of it, raising children, child protection and “non-traditional lifestyles”. Fully 3.7 million people said “no to [trans]gender”, which is what “Pride describes”, he said.
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More people participated in that referendum and voted the same way than in the ones on Hungary’s NATO and EU accessions or any other referendums, Orban said. He said it was now clear to Hungarians that whatever was “decided in Brussels” was enforced by the opposition in the capital, with their followers “lined up behind it”. This would be true regarding other issues, too, such as those of migration and Ukraine, he added.
Brussels would install puppet government
Orbán said, at the same time, that there was minor support in Hungary for “the topic of Pride, gender, gender reassignment surgery, same-sex marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples”, arguing that it “brings a few tens of thousands of people out onto the streets”, while 190,000 people “voted in favour of gender” in 2022. Many, he added, chose not to vote or cast an invalid vote, but “there are far more who reject this.”
“We already decided this once in 2022, and no demonstration or Pride parade will change my view on this matter,” the prime minister said. Orbán charged Brussels with aiming to install “a puppet government” to enforce its policies in Hungary and get “Ukraine sympathisers onto the streets”. “Then we’re finished,” he said. “The country is finished. There’s gender, there’s migration, and we’re up to our jugular in war.”
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“And now, irrespective of Pride, everyone can see a European political model controlled by Brussels,” Orbán said. “That’s why Brussels wants to replace the government that defends national sovereignty with a pro-Brussels and pro-Ukrainian one, because then they will be able to carry out everything the way they did at Pride.” As regards Ukraine’s European Union membership, Orbán said said the EU was not a security organisation and did not have military capabilities, adding that if the bloc admitted Ukraine it would find itself at war with Russia. “This isn’t hard to see, and Hungarians do see it.”
We can’t destroy ourselves for Ukraine
“We understand the Ukrainians; we’re helping them, but we can’t help them by destroying ourselves in the process,” the prime minister said. Orban said he had represented a clear position at last week’s European Council summit, adding that it “pained” the other member states that Hungary’s position was not an emotional but a “cold and rational” one.
He noted that he is the longest-serving prime minister in the EU and was the one to negotiate the last phase of Hungary’s NATO accession and the early stages of Hungary’s EU entry. “I know exactly how it happened,” he said, noting that a prerequisite of former Soviet bloc countries becoming EU members was first to join NATO, which guaranteed their military security and the location of their eastern borders.
But this guarantee was not in place in the case of Ukraine, he said, arguing that it had been decided that the country would not be admitted to NATO because that would lead to a world war. So the EU was incapable of securing a future member state’s eastern borders, Orbán said. “Ukraine wants to enter the EU when we don’t know its size or where its eastern borders lie,” he added.
Mafia and networks
“If everyone from Ukraine was free to enter Hungary, then the citizens of a country armed to the teeth with highly developed mafia skills and networks would be constantly in and out of Hungary,” Orban said. “We’d become a gateway for them and our domestic security would also be in danger.”
He added that if Ukraine became an EU member, “all the money would end up there, even though we’re already the ones funding the Ukrainian state, which wouldn’t be able to function without Western money”. At the same time, he said, Ukraine’s president was demanding that the EU finance a one million-strong Ukrainian military in the future and that member states give the country a certain percentage of their GDP so that it could function.
“This isn’t a good idea,” Orbán said, recommending that instead of giving Ukraine membership, the bloc should sign a strategic agreement with the country on how it would support Ukraine. “But they shouldn’t set a legal precedent, allowing Ukraine to drain our money or let businessmen with questionable backgrounds or mobsters come to Hungary and the European Union.” He said the EU should also sign an agreement that rules out any participation on its part in the war.
Ukraine’s NATO accession
Orbán said he was not saying that the EU should “forget about Ukraine” or that it should not support the country, but that “we shouldn’t support them by destroying ourselves in the process.” Orbán said at the NATO summit in Washington a year ago everyone “except us” talked up arming Ukraine and admitting the country to NATO, but a year later “there was no mention of this” at the latest NATO gathering.
During the recent NATO summit, the US president made clear “that he is pro-peace”, he said. NATO, he added, was not formed to wage war but to defend and establish peace, adding that Ukraine must not become a member of the alliance as there was “no question of NATO getting involved” in Ukraine-Russia war. Instead, the alliance, Orbán said, must focus on making itself stronger and “our own lives safer”.
A new situation had emerged, he said. “At last there’s somewhere, NATO, where we have won.” Hungary had turned its “isolated, losing position” into the “stronger, majority position”, alongside the US, Turkiye, and Slovakia, “a serious group”.
NATO-Russia agreement will come sooner or later
It was important that a majority in NATO should believe that a war with Russia “could lead us to a third world war” if the alliance intervened on the side of Ukraine. NATO “has not yet reached that point”, he said, adding that it was necessary to talk to Russia and reach an agreement lest there be an arms race. There was no point in a competition of strength and spending money on arms and building up an army when it could be spent elsewhere, he said.
“Sooner or later NATO and Russia must come to an agreement which would determine the volume of armaments on the battlefield and military spending, otherwise the sky’s the limit”. Orbán said the big players would decide the matter, though some could share “experiences of our own personal lives” with the heavy-hitters. “An arms race ruined our world once already. This brought down the communists and ended the Soviet Union, so it was beneficial, too. But massive amounts of money and energy were wasted on an needless arms race. Now we’re free and we belong to the West, we have no interest in repeating this,” the prime minister said.
Hungarians’ reputation
Meanwhile, referring to Hungarian astronaut Tibor Kapu, the prime minister noted Hungary had produced two Nobel laureates and an astronaut in the past two years. “Hungary’s reputation abroad is higher today than it was before” owing to “these excellent people”, he said.