PM Orbán threatens with veto before EU summit, awards Salvini, talks about cleaning in Brussels

Hungary’s parliament has declared that the country continues to support that Europe should be able to defend itself independently, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said ahead of a meeting of the Patriots for Europe party group in Brussels on Wednesday.

Speaking at the House of Hungarians in Brussels ahead of the meeting preparing for an EU summit, Orbán said Hungary supported armament aiming to ensure European security. “The question is where the money will come from. We propose that everyone puts in money from their own coffers. Funds should not come from a joint European loan. We do not want to be burdened with joint debts with anyone,” he said. Money should be held in a joint European security fund, Orbán said. “Hungary is ready and able” to do that, he added.

Orbán and Fico at the EU summit: friends.

Orbán cabinet opposes Ukraine’s EU membership

Thursday’s summit will, in part, focus on Ukraine’s EU membership, “which some will try to rush, but Hungary definitively opposes that”, he said. Orbán said that “so far, if we break it down to families and households, the war has cost 2.5 million forints [EUR 6,280] each. The costs of [Ukraine’s] EU accession would immediately come to 500,000 forints per household. We don’t want to shoulder that, so we will stick to our stance,” he added.

Regarding migration, Orbán said that “rebelling prime ministers who disagree with the migration policy and want to change it” would gather ahead of the summit on Thursday. The summit would see “an open conspiracy headed by the Italians aiming to curb the flow of illegal migrants,” he said.

The EU should support peace efforts

Fielding questions in English, Orbán said Hungary did not support EU monies being disbursed to Ukraine, adding that “in our understanding, there is one simple mission [for] the European Union, to support … President Donald Trump’s efforts to make peace.”

He said he was representing Hungarians’ opinions who believed strongly that all efforts should go towards brokering peace. “We are losing lives [by the] thousands which is totally against our values.” The war is also very expensive, Orbán said, “creating higher energy price, the bonds’ interest rates went up, and we lost export possibilities in Russia.”

Salvini awarded by Orbán

The liberal elite in Brussels must be replaced with a new, patriotic European leadership which will strengthen a Europe of nations rather than building its own power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Brussels on Wednesday, at a ceremony of the Hunyadi János Award of the Foundation for a Civic Hungary.

This year, the Hunyadi János Award was awarded to Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. Orbán told the event: “It is our shared task to restore a Europe of nations.” He said that the “rights unlawfully confiscated from nations” should be returned. Regulations must be enforced equally on all member states, he said. “The agents of the Soros network must be excluded from the European Commission, and corrupt lobbyists must be removed from the European Parliament. The European Union cannot be a financial network aiming to weaken national governments,” he said.

Cleaning in Brussels needed

“The cleaning that our friends in America are doing now will be needed here in Brussels as well,” he added. “The era of the progressive liberalism that reigns in Brussels is over; there’s a patriotic realignment taking place on the other side of the Atlantic,” Orbán said. “Patriots are the strongest political force in both central and southern Europe.”

“The progressives have taken over Brussels,” the prime minister said. “They rule Brussels. Unless we change this, we’ll soon have to watch Europe fall apart.” In his speech, Orbán said last autumn Salvini had been facing a prison sentence even though he had been “protecting his country and Europe”. Salvini, he said, had been “persecuted by the globalists because he dared to confront them”. But it had turned out, Orban added, “that the charges were all false and it was a political witch-hunt”. “Salvini deserves an award, not punishment, for what he does,” the prime minister added.

Masses of people flood Europe

Orbán warned that Europe was being “flooded by unprecedented masses of people”, arguing that 9 million illegal migrants had made their way to the continent since 2015. “Strikingly, this is the number we learned from the Soros plan in 2015,” Orban said. “One million migrants a year, so not only does the plan exist, but it’s also working.” He said that if migrants formed a single country, they would now be the European Union’s 15 largest.

Orbán said that while Hungary had stopped illegal migration on land, Salvini had stopped it on sea. “We both protected our nations and this has resulted in there now being patriots in government in both Italy and Hungary,” Orbán said.

Islamic extremism

He said Salvini was not just protecting his country, “but an entire civilisation”, adding that “the battle is being fought for the soul of the Western world”, which was “worth even the hardest struggle”.

In his acceptance speech, Salvini said the biggest threats to Europe were “Islamic extremism” and uncontrolled immigration. He said it was important to protect the freedom of speech and push back against censorship, adding that the new US administration offered “great hope” to Europe when it came to freedom. He urged patriots to pour all of their energy into achieving victory for the causes important to them.

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