PM Orbán: Trump will bring peace, anti-Russia sanctions should be abolished, Soros empire moved to Brussels, Ukraine should not join the EU – UPDATE: opposition reactions
A new day will dawn on the West on Tuesday morning after US President-elect Donald Trump takes office and the “bitter, difficult, painful and failure-ridden four years” of the Democratic administration comes to an end, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told public radio.
Not surprising that US-Hungary relations hit rock bottom under Democrat leadership
Orbán said that the Democratic administration had got off to a “bad start” because “after all, they stole the presidency from Donald Trump”. “If they hadn’t cheated in 2020, Donald Trump would’ve stayed in office and then the Ukraine-Russia war doesn’t happen,” he said.
The prime minister said Democratic administrations were “always different” from Republican ones, arguing that Republicans “stand on a national foundation” while Democrats “are globalists” who enforced their interests through global organisations “like the Soros network”. “While not directly government organisations, these networks are connected to the US government,” he said.
Orbán said Democrats put their economic interests before politics and had “strong world-bettering intentions”. “That’s when the world is flooded with migration and the related chaos, gender madness runs rampant … and they don’t hesitate to use war to meet their objectives, as they did in the Russia-Ukraine war,” he added.
Orbán said that Hungary-US relations “were expected” to hit rock bottom during a Democrat administration. The US did not extend the agreement on double taxation and made Hungarians’ travel into the US more difficult, “they harmed us wherever they could”, he said.
US sanctions strengthened minister’s position, says Orbán
Orbán said sanctions against Antal Rogán, the Hungarian cabinet minister, were “just the last, smallest story” in that process. “This has strengthened the minister’s position in Hungarian politics and the government to an unprecedented degree … if Antal Rogán, the minister responsible for national security services and the first vanguard in the protection of the nation’s sovereignty, is being penalised by a world power, that means he is doing his job well.”
Orbán said President-elect Donald Trump‘s inauguration on Monday would be the “start of a new era”.
Commenting on the work of outgoing US ambassador David Pressman, Orbán said the US “has sent a thug here with the task of forcing Hungary into the globalist, liberal, Democrat canon that is pro-migration, pro-gender and ready to use war to spread the word and Western values in the world”. “The problem was that Hungary is not such a country,” that it has a 1,100-year history, “its own way and mission” that did not suffer “a thug coming here and telling us that this land is no longer ours, that others will come from the other side of the world to move into what we have worked for for 1,100 years,” Orbán said.
Pressman’s work was therefore “doomed to fail from the start”, he said. He said he had refused to meet the ambassador during his tenure: “His task was clear even when he arrived, and I didn’t want to assist to that.” Orbán said Hungarians were family friendly, and “can’t accept disdain and mockery of the traditional family model.”
Trump liberated America
He said he had an agreement with Trump to launch a “fantastic, long-ranging golden age in US-Hungarian relations that will be noticeable in everyday life, in pockets and families’ budgets”. Trump’s election victory had been a “prerequisite of the Hungarian economy’s flying start as early as this January”, as it had brought the possibility of peace and construction after three years of war destruction, Orbán said.
President-elect Trump had “liberated America” and US billionaire George Soros’s “forces” have retreated to Brussels, Orbán said.
“The single objective for us Europeans has to be to push them out of Brussels. If we fail to do this then Brussels will become the new Washington, continuing to pursue the policies of US Democrats, which goes against the interests of the European and the Hungarian people.”
He said the top foreign policy goal of 2025 had to be pushing the “Soros empire” out of Europe. Orbán said Hungary, which, he noted, “has always openly engaged in this conflict”, was likely to be the first country to drive out the “Soros empire”.
Soros empire in Brussels
“It’s time to set the record straight and wind up the networks endangering Hungarian sovereignty and send them packing,” Orbán said, adding he hoped that Hungary would not be alone in doing this. The prime minister said the number one priority was “taking funding away from them, or to be more precise, not giving it to them in the first place”.
“The Soros network today is funded in large part from the Brussels budget. We mustn’t tolerate this; this is our money, too,” he added.
Orbán said the biggest corruption scandal was that “George Soros has got Brussels in his pocket”. “The MEPs, Brussels bureaucrats and serious decision-makers are obviously bought and paid for,” he said, adding representatives of the “Soros network” paid regular visits to Brussels.
He said Hungary had to set an example in driving out the “Soros network”, adding that this was what the spring would be about.
Everyone talks about peace
As regards the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the EU, Orbán said its success had even been acknowledged by the government’s political opponents in Brussels.
He said that whereas at the start of the six-month presidency only the Vatican and Hungary had been talking about peace, today everyone was talking about it. “So we managed to get the issue of peace on the table and keep it there,” he added.
Orbán said that though the peace mission taken on by Hungary “was disproportionate to the country’s weight on the international stage”, it had still carried it out “as a Christian country and out of a moral duty”.
Trump will bring peace, Orbán believes
But, he added, it was now time for Donald Trump to “take up the torch” and “continue the difficult mission that is more in line with the weight of the United States”.
The second important result, he said, was Bulgaria and Romania’s accession to the Schengen area, noting the work done by himself, EU Affairs Minister Janos Boka and Interior Minister Sandor Pinter.
He noted that the EU entered into accession talks with Albania during the Hungarian presidency, and “the issue of the Western Balkans has been brought back into European politics alongside the Ukraine issue to which everything took a back seat”.
Meanwhile, he said the Hungarian presidency had managed to conclude important agreements concerning the issue of the bloc’s competitiveness, adding that Hungary had “punched above its weight” during its time at the helm of the Council of the EU.
Orbán warned that a new era was about to begin, so the most important consideration was for Brussels to adapt to the new situation, “primarily when it comes to the issue of war and peace as well as sanctions”.
Sanctions-free relationship with Russia needed
“It’s time we threw sanctions out the window and establish a sanctions-free relationship with the Russians,” the prime minister said, adding, however, that the signs coming from Brussels were “not encouraging at the moment”, and such a shift would take “one or two months”.
He said Ukraine’s accession to the European Union “would, for the time being, bring more dangers than opportunities from the point of view of Hungarians”.
He said “Ukraine can be dealt with” once the war had ended and the EU’s policy of sanctions concluded, “because it is a serious challenge, even a threat” to the European economy.
Ukraine’s accession as envisaged by the EU today would mean that “Hungarian, Polish, and even French farmers can close up shop”, he said, adding that such a move would require “sufficiently stringent regulations.”
Keep an eye on Brussels, Ukraine
Orbán said Ukraine “cannot stand on its own feet … it wouldn’t exist today without Western monies”. He said the country “has no economic activity that could be integrated into the European economy, there are only ruins”. At the same time, Ukraine’s agriculture, which remains productive, “is expressly clashing with the European economy rather than fitting in with it,” he said.
Orbán said that when discussing the Hungarian economy, it was important “to keep one eye on Ukraine and Brussels”.
Meanwhile, the prime minister said 2025 would be “the year of strengthening the middle class”.
Orbán said he expected a “tangible advance” for all strata of society in 2025 and said assistance would go to people who were still under the middle class threshold.
Orbán said the government’s most important goal was ensuring work for everyone, adding that the aim was achievable in 2025, pointing to the 81 percent employment rate among 20- to 65-year-olds, the fifth- or sixth-highest rate in Europe.
The government also aims to ensure incomes are enough to support families and pave the way for everybody to feel they are taking a step ahead, he added.
2025 will be fantastic
He said he expected 2025 to be a “fantastic year”, noting that 2024 had been about compensating for the losses inflicted on the country by the war in 2023, such as the “energy shock”. “But since we’ve done that, we have a good starting position for this year,” he added.
Orbán said the domestic savings rate was at 24 percent compared with the EU average of 14 percent, adding this meant that there was a “household financial savings system that can be mobilised for 2025”.
He said high energy prices were the biggest threat to the success of Hungary’s economic policy, so the aim was to ensure that Brussels did not pursue a sanctions policy that went counter to falling prices.
Orbán said that until expansion of Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant was completed between 2030 and 2032, the country was vulnerable when it came to energy, so significant energy price increases could “thwart our economic plans”.
He also said Hungary could not carry out its economic plans unless the TurkStream natural gas pipeline was protected and kept running.
UPDATE: Opposition reactions
The opposition Tisza and Jobbik parties have criticised Prime Minister Viktor Orbán over his morning radio interview for “failing to touch on several important topics”, while the Democratic Coalition has said the prime minister “needs to be replaced together with his regime”.
Péter Magyar, the leader of the Tisza Party, said Orbán “got buried under his own lies during his weeks-long luxurious vacation in India”.
“While the prime minister talked about the fight against illegal migration, he made no mention of how he himself released 2,290 convicted people smugglers from Hungarian prisons,” Magyar said in a statement.
He said Orbán had also “failed to mention that the Hungarian economy is not off to a flying start, and all the important indicators are down”. He criticised the prime minister for not mentioning “the cost-of-living crisis they have pushed millions of Hungarians into”.
Magyar said food prices were “out of control again”, adding that food inflation in Hungary was 2.5 times the EU average over the last four years.
He vowed that his government would cut the VAT rate on fruits and vegetables, and eventually all basic foodstuffs, to 5 percent if Tisza won the election.
Opposition Jobbik criticised Orbán for “limiting his interview to talking about Trump, Soros and Ukraine”.
The party said in a statement that fuel prices and inflation were rising again, the forint was weakening, bank fees were up and the health-care sector was “falling deeper into crisis”.
They said Orbán had failed to offer any solutions to these problems in the interview.
Ferenc Gyurcsány, the leader of the leftist Democratic Coalition (DK), said his party agreed with “the assessment of the United States administration that Antal Rogan, the minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, is corrupt.”
He said “the regime as a whole, including the prime minister” was corrupt, “but the regime cannot be banned from the US”.
Gyurcsány said “the regime’s … key elements and people cannot be ousted one by one” and “Orbán has to be replaced together with the regime”.
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