The striking similarities between the speeches of Orbán and Putin

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has recently given his annual state of the nation address, followed by the “historical” speech of Vladimir Putin. The similarity in their rhetoric is so striking that it is hard to believe that Hungary and Russia are placed on opposite sides of the spectrum in world politics.

President Putin has delivered a state of the nation speech in Moscow, close to the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán held a similar speech to a selected audience, and as hvg.hu notes, there are several topics in which they hold a similar view.

Blaming the West for the war

Both leaders are emphasising the responsibility of the West in the escalation of the war in Ukraine. “They plan to turn a local conflict into a global confrontation” – Putin is quoted by the BBC – which resonates well with Orbán’s views.

Being the leader of a NATO-member country, Orbán had to use carefully chosen words. But he reinstated that the West “did not isolate the conflict but lifted it onto an all-European level. It could have treated it as a local regional war”.

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Criticising the morality of the West

Both Orbán and Putin are questioning the morality of the West, and both are giving a great deal of attention to gender issues and pedophilia. According to Putin, the West is destroying its own people, where “the perversion that is child abuse all the way up to pedophilia, is advertised as the norm”. The West is a place in the Russian president’s eyes, where priests are “forced” to marry same-sex people.

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Orbán couldn’t miss his chance to mention Brussels regarding pedophilia. “Let’s be straightforward. There is no excuse for pedophilia. The child is sacred and inviolable. It is the job of parents to protect children at all costs. We don’t care that the world has gone mad, what repulsive fads some people indulge in. We do not care what Brussels uses to excuse and explain the inexplicable. This is Hungary! And this is where the strictest child protection system in Europe should be!” – hvg.hu quotes the Prime Minister.

Although Orbán states that the West is responsible for the escalation of the war, the Hungarian Prime Minister sees little chance for direct conflict between the two parties.

“In terms of conventional warfare, the war in Ukraine showed that Russia would not stand a chance against NATO. The world saw that Russian forces were not in a position to attack NATO and would not be for some time.”

Source: hvg.hu, BBC, Reuters