Orbán slams Ukraine and Brussels during EU Parliamentary Speakers’ Summit in Budapest
“If Ukraine is admitted to the European Union, war will also be admitted,” the prime minister said in Budapest at a conference of EU parliamentary speakers on Monday.
As we wrote today, EU Parliamentary leaders meet in Budapest to discuss future challenges, read details HERE.
Viktor Orbán said several EU members were for continued support to Ukraine so that that country can go on fighting. “We are of a different opinion, we think the longer the war goes on the more people will die and the worse the situation on the battlefield,” he said.
Concerning the European Commission’s proposal to make it mandatory for member states to give up Russian energy supplies, Orbán said “it would simply kill the Hungarian economy”. “Just imagine the price of energy suddenly doubling for households and companies … Hungarian families could not cope with that,” he said.
“Hungarians want peace and would get rid of the policy of economic sanctions as soon as possible,” Orbán said. Meanwhile, Orbán said the EU had never admitted a country at war “with good reason”. In addition, he said, “member states could not bear the economic burden Ukraine’s membership would pose”. He also said that the earlier accession of central and eastern European countries had benefitted the community. “But the situtation with Ukraine is different … it would be a bad deal resulting in an agricultural crisis, unemployment, indebtedness and deteriorating conditions of life,” he said.
Related article: Hungarian spy scandal in Ukraine: did Hungarian intelligence gather military data for Moscow?
Orbán: ‘More respect for national parliaments!’
Europe needs “a new strategy and strong leaders” and “more respect for national parliaments,” Orbán said. “Europe is now rich and weak, the most dangerous combination; therefore, the community needs to be reinforced,” Orbán told the conference, the closing event of parliamentary events in connection with Hungary’s EU presidency.
Europe grew strong through the emergence of nation states, and the EU became successful through cooperation between nation states, “through the strong leaders of strong national democracies,” Orbán said. The EU “owes everything to national parliaments” and “if it wants to be successful, it must pay more respect to national parliaments, which are not artificial institutions created by agreements but real bodies of popular representation, developing through an organic development,” the prime minister said.
Brussels “threatens cutting community funding for those that protect the framework of nation-states; if that does not work, it will thwart national governments, topple them, and help power agent parties ready to give up national sovereignty,” Orbán said, adding that “they are making an attempt in Hungary for the third time.”
Orbán: Western strategy to break Russia failed
Orbán compared the changes in global politics to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, “the birth of modern nation states”. “The world is in reshuffle, the ideology of the Western world is changing, and we Europeans need to react to that,” Orbán said, and asked participants to focus on issues around national sovereignty and Ukraine’s aspirations for EU membership, adding that those subjects would “define the future of EU member states and the role of their parliaments in the next decades.”
He said progressive liberalism had failed in the United States and was replaced by patriotism, “which has serious international consequences. He said what had happened in the US was “no electoral accident … but the start of a new era”; the US was interested in promoting a liberal international order in the past 80 years but “now it has started dismantling that system as it is not seen as serving its own interests.”
Meanwhile, he said, “China is forging ahead and has become a competitor not only in terms of industrial capacity but also concerning the level of its technology.” He added that “India is about to make a debut in world politics” and suggested that India could become “a global power centre comparable to China”.
Yet, Europe is unprepared, Orbán said. “It’s as if we wanted to resolve the problems of the next decade with responses from the previous decade, but old truths do not work anymore, the world has changed, and we Europeans have failed to follow suit,” he said. Orbán said that he had witnessed “the years the EU has wasted”, adding that “if we had governed Hungary as the European Commission managed Europe we would long be bankrupt.”
Orbán said the western strategy to break Russia had failed. “Nobody dares to admit it but we have lost this war,” he said, and added that Russia’s economy had not collapsed, sanctions had not worked, and the Russians had managed to thwart Ukraine’s NATO membership.
He said the US had realised that and they were now involved in negotiations whereas “we Europeans” still go on with the war and act as if victory were still possible. “I hope I will not be right, but eventually we will be left alone with a war next door, with all our money spent on an unachievable victory,” he said.
The EU has given up a successful economic strategy based on cheap Russian energy and modern German technologies, but “it has failed to come up with a new one … we are in the middle of nowhere”, Orbán said. He insisted that US and Chinese companies buy energy at one third or fourth of the price European companies pay because “in the wake of the sanctions cheap energy has disappeared from Europe … the sanctions and the Green Deal together will destroy the European economy.”
Europe’s economy “is on a backtrack rather than in competition”, Orbán said, adding that out of the world’s 50 largest tech companies only four were European. The gap between the GDPs of Europe and the US has doubled in the past 20 years to the benefit of the US, while real wages in the US have grown twice as fast as in Europe since the year 2000, he added.
Orbán called for a new strategy and strong European leaders, and said “Europe now is rich and weak, the most dangerous combination, therefore the community needs to be reinforced.”
related article: Hungary and Slovakia unite against EU proposal to ban Russian energy imports