PM Orbán wants to eliminate the Soros network and attract more US investments than Chinese to Hungary

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Friday called for the “full elimination of the Soros network”, adding that sanctions must be imposed against anyone who accepts foreign funds with the aim of influencing Hungarian politics.

No one is allowed to accept foreign funding to buy influence

“They need to be swept away … now that the US president has got started,” Orbán said in an interview to public radio. All funding arriving from the US must be made public, and sanctions must be imposed against those who accept them, he said. No one is allowed to accept foreign funding with the aim of influencing Hungarian politics, Orbán said, adding that those who break that rule faced legal consequences.

He welcomed “the window when the US and Hungary both have governments that accept sovereignty as the greatest value… They are doing what we have been building for 15 years here, and this is the moment when we can settle the score with these international networks, when we can sweep them out and make their operations legally unviable,” Orbán said.

“This will not be an easy job”, Orbán said, adding that he expected big disputes around the issue. “This job must be done; Hungarian sovereignty must be protected.” Orbán said Hungarian civil organisations and NGOs had received money from “the Soros foundations, the US government and Brussels”, to promote left-wing causes, strengthen opposition parties and topple the government.

US budget used by liberal elite

Trump has decided to make public the sums US government agencies had paid in past years, and the organisations they had paid them to, Orbán said. “The global liberal elite used the US budget and government to finance their financial an ideological agenda worldwide. They made it look like aid, but it was really a tool of political influence,” he said.

He said the beneficiaries had received funding from Soros foundations and the US budget. “They used that money for activities [aimed at] dismantling the community, supporting migration, going against families and financing gender madness worldwide,” he said. In Hungary’s case, “Brussels also supports those aims,” he added.

At the same time, “no one in Hungary gave these organisations a mandate to do what they’re doing,” he said. Orbán said that those NGOs, while insisting that they kept politics at arms length, only supported issues linked to leftist parties. “So they received the money to force through those issues, strengthen opposition parties and topple the government.”

“In Hungarian, the word ‘agent’ was overused in Communist times, but these people are agents in the American sense of the word, meaning that they don’t serve their own countries but accept funding from another power to represent their aims, ideologies and programmes,” Orbán said.

Conspiration theory fans in trouble because they were right

As an example, he pointed to the news outlet Politico, which he said had received funding from Brussels, the US and the Soros network, and continued to criticise Hungary and its prime minister, while “putting the emerging candidates of the opposition on all sorts of image-building lists”. Politicians such as Peter Marki-Zay and Peter Magyar “are promoted as the most promising and talented politicians; they’re trying to make them accepted and popular in Hungary and abroad,” he said.

Orbán said that in the wake of “Tornado Trump”, facts were coming to light. “The fans of conspiracy theories are now in trouble; they will have to come up with new theories because [what they called conspiracy theories so far] have been shown to be true.”

For example, “they have always denied the existence of a Soros migration plan, and yet 9 million illegal migrants arrived in Europe in the past 9 years, just as described [in the plan], and those supporting it all received monies.” “I’m not saying this is a conspiracy, but it is a dark thing indeed. Various financial resources — Brussels, the Soros Foundation, the US budget — ploughed large sums into the political lives of certain countries with specific political aims.”

He said the anti-government movements in Slovakia and Serbia were financed in the same way, “and they want the same in Hungary”. Meanwhile, Orbán said Hungary was preparing to sign a “substantial” economic agreement with the US, having agreed on it with President Trump before the US election.

The agreement would aim to remedy the “destruction wrought by Democrats [in the area of] US-Hungarian economic ties” who refused to renew certain agreements and introduced sanctions as well as imposing difficulties on travel. Meanwhile, “not only will we remedy the past, we will also have to open up new vistas,” he said.

Orbán hopes American investments will return

Under the Democrat administration, in Hungary Chinese investments overtook those of the US, which was unprecedented, Orbán said, adding that he hoped the new agreement would remedy that situation.

A rebellion against the EU migration pact was needed rather than a reasoned response, Orbán said, adding that Hungary had been the “first rebel” and was now having to pay a fine of 1 million dollars each day.

“This still costs us less than if we allowed the migrants in,” he said. Poland, Orbán added, had also “rebelled”, declaring that it would refuse to implement the migration pact. But liberal government would escape punishment, he said.

In the wake of Italy, “the Germans have also declared their revolt”, he said, 70 percent of the German people who expressed opposition to EU migration policy ahead of the upcoming German elections. Meanwhile, Orbán said that every year the government had “won the battle over the 13th month”, and this was true of this year too.

He said repeated calls for its elimination had taken place over the years, while demands for reform of the pension system usually ended with money falling into someone else’s hands, he added, mentioning “speculators, businessmen, financiers, banks, and people like that”.

13th month pension

Orbán said less money for the people and more money for the banks was the basic logic behind policymaking in Brussels. “We’re resisting this,” he said. “This battle was won this year, too, because the 13th month pension is not paid in twelve equal parts but in one lump sum.” Orbán also referred to the government’s decision to extend its scheme supporting rural home renovations is offering opportunities for 600,000 elderly people.

In Hungary’s 2,900 localities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, there are some 420,000 pensioner households, “so we can say with ease” that some 600,000 people have now received access to the programme, he said. They, along with other participants, can now apply for 3 million forints (EUR 7,400) in funding and another 3 million in government subsidised loans for renovating, extending or improving their homes, he said.

The right-wing government sees pensioners as “the people, thanks to whom we are here; the builders of this country, those who maintained it and worked for us,” Orbán said. He said the government’s stance on pensions was driven by a “deep Christian feeling”.

Orbán said programmes launched this year were showing signs of success, with positive feedback on the rural home creation scheme and tens of thousands of people having applied for employee and SME loans.

He said the left saw village life and the community “as a thing of the past”, while the government regarded the village as “the most attractive way of life in the future”, and it was taking measures to strengthen this way of life.

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