Orbán: Current battles with EU not helping Hungary’s development

As long as “there is an ethnic foundation”, policies built on ethnic foundations have a future in the Carpathian Basin, the prime minister told the Hungarian Permanent Conference (MÁÉRT) on Friday.

The elections in Slovakia in which the ethnic Hungarian party “failed to make it to parliament multiple times in a row” revived the question whether ethnically based politics had a future, especially considering declining demographics, Viktor Orbán said.

According to the Hungarian government, “preserving the ethnic foundations is our joint responsibility”, and as long as that exists, the politics based on ethnic groups also has a future, he said.

The situation of Transcarpathia Hungarians “is the hardest, most painful aspect of Hungarian life in the Carpathian Basin”, Orbán said. Hungary stands by Hungarians living in Ukraine, he said, and he lamented that “Ukraine still has time to harrass Hungarians amid a bloody patriotic war.”

Current battles with EU not helping Hungary’s development

Hungary today is having to fight battles with the European Union that do not help its development, Orbán said.

Orbán said he expected major disputes in the EU in the coming months, “the outcome of which will determine Hungary’s room for manoeuvre in the coming decades”.

One is whether the EU will pivot from unanimous decision-making to majority decisions, he said. That move would require an amendment of the EU treaties, which would be possible only with unanimous vote, he added. “That won’t happen as long as there is a single country against [majority voting].”

Hungary, Orbán said, saw unanimous voting as the “last guarantee for protecting national interests”, and so such a decision was “out of the question”.

“Hungary won’t have a parliament in the next 120 years that would vote for that, regardless of party affiliation,” he said.

Orbán: Cooperation among Hungarians solution to challenges of ‘world slipping apart’

The answer to the challenges of “a world slipping apart” lies in strengthening cooperation among Hungarians, Orbán said.

“Our answer to that slipping apart is unity,” Orbán said. In the coming years, the essence of Hungary’s strategy for Hungarian communities beyond the borders should be strengthening cooperation among Hungarians “as the world around us disintegrates and slips apart”, he said.

This year, Hungary was able to maintain programmes and institutions created to support Hungarians outside the country but had no capacity to expand them, Orbán said.

He said the country was expected to return to growth in 2024, and the resources for that expansion would again be at hand. The latest increase in the minimum wage show that “life is returning into the Hungarian economy, and we’ve managed to drag it out of recession”. This, the prime minister added, would give the opportunity to revive development schemes for Hungarians beyond the borders, too, he said.

Orbán: Europe squeezed out of new world power, economic structure

Europe has been squeezed out of a new global power and economic structure, and has been devalued as a result, Orbán said.

Orban said Europe’s opinion was now considered a “sidebar” rather than an important factor influencing outcomes.

“There are two suns in the sky, neither of them European,” he said.

The prime minister said that agreements were now being shaped by the US and China, with the latter “producing economic growth that is slowly but surely leaving that of the western world behind”.

“This is a crisis for us, a European crisis of confidence and self-evaluation; we’re not used to that,” he said. Europe will have to find answers “to what constitutes sensible behaviour” in such a situation, he added.

He said one “school of thought” promoted competition, trade and “trying to strengthen ourselves” as a solution, while the other suggested protectionism and isolationism, he said. The latter “is of the opinion that preserving what we’ve got is already an achievement.” He added that this debate was pervasive in every European Council summit and in every EU ministerial meeting, he added.

Orbán: Solely up to Hungarians to decide who stays in Hungary

It is solely up to Hungarians to decide who can and cannot reside in Hungary and on what terms, Orbán said, adding that immigration enforcement rules must be transparent and strict.

Orbán said whereas western European leaders thought that Muslim immigrants could be secularised in the same way that traditional European Christian communities had been, Muslims did not want to be secularised and felt at home with a different life philosophy, “which they see as superior to secularised European life”.

So chances of real integration were “extremely small”, he said.

Hungary, the prime minister said, must tighten its immigration rules as the relevant 2007 law had been introduced before the advent of “migration inflation”.

A transparent and enforceable system must be created, Orbán said, “otherwise Westerners will sweep us away”.

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