Orban: Hungarians Freedom Fighters
(MTI) – Hungarians are freedom fighters who only feel good if they live in an “order of freedom”, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in Sopronpuszta on Tuesday.
Addressing a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Pan-European Picnic near the border with Austria, Orban said the level of freedom has indisputably improved over the past 25 years and in this respect the democratic transition has earned top marks. At the same time, inflation remains and state debt is high, while unemployment, public assets and public order have become worse, he added.
Good performance should be kept and the bad must be changed, Orban said.
In the second half of the eighties it was a given idea that the “ragged East” should take over the western model, but by now it is clear that western Europe’s economy is extremely vulnerable, too, he said.
“Today we must think about what is good for Hungarians here and now, and not where things are done better (…),” he said.
Orban said that because of cultural differences Hungary cannot borrow from Chinese, Russian, Japanese or South Korean models, but, at the same time, it cannot join a western European track which is clearly losing its reserves, and perhaps it has already depleted them.
Orban said Hungary would soon catch up with the Europaen Union’s average wages, if the current economic policies can continue and economic growth can be boosted from the 2-4 percent range into the 4-6 percent range.
He added that in the early 1990s it was not possible to take certain steps because of a lack of a two-thirds majority in parliament. In 2010, a “revolution” was carried out with [Fidesz’s] two-thirds victory, which was repeated this year, he said. He noted that in 1994 the Socialist-liberal coalition had also carried out their own “two-thirds revolution” and changed in Budapest what they felt important.
Remembering the Opposition Roundtable [of the 1989 regime change], Orban said Fidesz was a radical, anti-communist independence movement and there was much talk at the time about how far deep changes should be pushed. In the end, they agreed that they must be as radical as possible, because “even if there is a reversal, “this is Central European history, and reversal is always to the last point where they managed to get to,” he said.
“It was agreed that now when it is possible to go forward, we must not over-analyse and build big theories, but do everything that must be done, that takes the country towards freedom,” he said.
Photo: MTI – Szilard Koszticsak
Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters
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