PM Viktor Orbán says the liberal elite must be pushed aside

Hungary is the most steadfast and vocal proponent of the cause of families and demographics in European politics, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told the 5th Budapest Demographic Summit on Thursday.

Orbán said the Hungarian government was preparing to draft the country’s “family policy 2.0”, and called on participants to “turn European family policy around together.”

Liberals’ attacks against Hungary for its pro-family, conservative and patriotic policies are in vain, “that only make us tougher – there will be no change,” Orbán said.

Orbán welcomed attendees, saying that the large number of visitors showed “the matter of families and children moves people everywhere in the world.”

Since the last summit two years ago, “the world has changed, and we now live in the shadow of war,” he said.

At the same time, he welcomed that right-wing parties and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni won the elections in Italy. “We thought Italy would never have a patriotic, family-loving, Christian government again.”

Orbán agreed with Meloni that Europe’s future was in families, and that “it is important for children to have a father and a mother.”

He said Italy and Hungary were both the “homeland of freedom fighters”. “Freedom without authority descends into chaos, and authority without freedom becomes authoritarianism,” he added.

Orbán also greeted the Chairman of the Azeri parliament, the Serbian president of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bulgarian president.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev is the “guarantee for stability in Bulgaria”, an important ally of Hungary in the fight against illegal migration and in protecting energy security, he said.

Orbán said Europe was led by a progressive liberal elite “busy with all kinds of nonsense” instead of important European issues, such as the future of the continent’s demography.

He cited a survey of the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, which said that European surveys were biased towards “the fears of the progressive political elite” and did nothing to probe the real concerns of Europeans.

“This is the most worrying development in the West in the past 70 years,” he said. Leaders may have “no idea of the real problems of real life” in a dictatorship, but that is unimmaginable in a western democracy, he added.

European citizens want to be able to start families in safe homes, to raise their children in peace and security. These are “demographic issues, which continue to be far down on the agenda in European politics.”

Orbán said the root of that phenomenon was that liberals had “hacked” the political life in the West.

Western political life, “the discourse, the outlook, the way of thinking, the interpretation framework of how the world works,” has been hacked by the liberals in two steps, he said. The first step was spreading the view that the individual was the most important thing in the world. “They see dictators in everyone who sets boundaries to their individual wishes,” he said.

Those boundaries, however, are also railguides, he said. The boundaries of family life “are essential for freedom; freedom requires at least two people, one person alone is not free but lonely.”

Liberals also tried to “hack” European life by “spreading strategic fears of the future”, the prime minister said. “Liberals strive to keep irrational fears from the future on the agenda, and to magnify them,” he said.

“Liberals expect people to live submitting all their actions to an impending apocalypse,” he said.

Source: MTI