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Mr Orbán also said on 7 November Budapest will host “a summit of the western world” focusing on the economic competitiveness of the European Union. The Prime Minister recalled that recently French President Emmanuel Macron and former President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi made much more dramatic and harsher statements about the state of the European economy than he normally does. He added that according to the French President, the European Union will die unless it urgently improves its competitiveness because it is losing its markets. At the same time, according to Mario Draghi, unless the EU takes urgent action, the European economy will find itself stranded, he detailed.
He said when we talk about the difficulties of the European economy, we are not speaking from a specific Hungarian point of view, but it is an admitted fact, an opinion shared by the leaders of Europe. “The emperor has no clothes, and now the Hungarians are not the only children to point out in the crowd that ‘that man has no clothes;’ there are ever more of us, including adults,” he said.
According to the Prime Minister, the French President plays a key role in the development of a new European economic policy and a more competitive European economy. Mr Orbán said a summit of the eastern world is currently taking place in Kazan, the summit of the BRICS countries. He said on 7 November Hungary will host a summit of the western world, the meeting of the European Political Community to be attended by the leaders of more than forty states; not only EU Member States, we will also have here the British Prime Minister and the Turkish President. He added that the summit of the leaders of the 27 EU Member States will be held – also in Budapest – on the following day.
Regarding his talks with French President Emmanuel Macron at the beginning of the week, Mr Orbán said he consulted with him about the summit of the western world because this is “the French President’s brainchild,” he invented this formation, and therefore good manners dictate and it is only right that he should consult with him about the Budapest meeting. The summit will focus on the competitiveness of the European economy, he stated.
Mr Orbán asked the residents of Budapest to exercise patience in connection with the traffic inconveniences likely to be caused by the summit. He also observed that it “adds some piquancy” to the date of the meeting that it will be held two days after the presidential election in the United States which could easily create an entirely new situation in world politics.
Hungary must pursue its own path, the Prime Minister stated, arguing for economic neutrality. Mr Orbán recalled that at the time of the fall of communism, we were compelled to realise that the economy built in the part of the world ruled by the Soviets was not competitive, and so in the 1990s and 2000s Hungary adopted the institutions and methods of capitalism or the market economy which made western countries successful. In the Prime Minister’s opinion, today, however, the western world is in trouble and is losing its competitiveness.
At the same time, he added, in Hungary we are unable to adopt the eastern economic methods that appear to be more successful than ours because they cannot be copied from a civilisational, cultural point of view. But he also warned that if Hungary continues on the same path as the West as it has done to date, we ourselves “will end up falling into a precipice,” “together with the European economy we will become extinct as well.”
The only solution is, he said in continuation, to put together from examples from around the world an economic model which can be readily customised for the Hungarians and is compatible with their culture. In his view, the Hungarians are creative enough to succeed in this endeavour. “Meaning that we must adopt everything that is good from the West, we must adopt everything that is good from the East, but we mustn’t adopt anything that is not good for the Hungarians either from the East or from the West. For the sake of simplicity, we can describe this mentality and policy as ‘economic neutrality,’ meaning that Hungary must follow its own path,” he said.
Mr Orbán further explained that the Cold War mentality which had captured the West ever since the Russo-Ukrainian war had also emerged in the economy. The Prime Minister took the view that bringing the Cold War back was a bad idea. He stated that Hungary had the right to pursue an economic policy of its own, and it was only a question of ability, courage and skill to use that right.
If we managed to stay out of the Russo-Ukrainian war, we can also stay out of a bad economic policy that is based on a flawed war logic, he said, adding that in order to achieve that, we must be good “in the difficult negotiations conducted in the back rooms of politics behind closed doors,” but the Hungarians have never been bad in this department, and so “we have no reason to have an inferiority complex in this regard.” “We usually stand our ground” in these complex power negotiations as well; at the end of the day, we have stayed out of the war and have received a written guarantee that we will not be required to take part in the war even during the term of the new NATO Secretary General. We successfully negotiated – while the whole European Union turns its back on energy sources coming from Russia – that Hungary may purchase gas and oil from Russia, and that the Slovaks and the Czechs, too, can do the same, he listed.
We have always found scope for manoeuvre,” and therefore “there is no point in starting from the defeatist assumption that the big ones will down us anyway,
Mr Orbán said.
He observed that one would have thought that there was no scope for manoeuvre in the Russo-Ukrainian war because “if the whole of the European Union sings from the same hymn sheet, a country can hardly stay out of that.” We nonetheless did. “They’re in a losing war up to their necks, but Hungary isn’t because we didn’t become involved in the first place,” he said. Naturally, “if the Lord helps us,” in America pro-war forces will be replaced with pro-peace ones with President Trump’s return, and “then we can breathe a sigh of relief because we won’t be alone anymore,” he said, adding that “walking across the bridge next to an elephant, we would strike a whole different impression.”
Mr Orbán also spoke about the fact that a decision driven by the European People’s Party has been made in Brussels. A plan is now complete, and this is not a secret conspiracy against Hungary, it was openly announced in the European Parliament, he recalled. “They said ‘it’s over, Prime Minister, you and your government should clear out, and we have here instead of you a new prospective prime minister and a new prospective governing party. We Brusselites support them,’” he said. They want a puppet government, all empires are like this, the Soviets were the same, too, he observed.
He added that you cannot expect anything else because the same thing happened in Poland, too, and in came Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The Brusselites want “a jawohl government” when a telephone call comes from Brussels or Berlin, we must say ‘jawohl,’ he warned, adding that we Hungarians can be expected to resist this pressure and to not want a puppet government, a puppet prime minister and a puppet state.
He said this is not just a simple power issue because Brussels also has disputes with Hungary in economic policy issues as well, and should we yield, had we yielded, this would cause the people much pain. Instead of the low Hungarian personal income tax they want to see higher taxes, they want us to withdraw the taxes imposed on multinational companies and they want us to cancel the reduction of household utility charges because a large part of its costs is covered by their businesses. They demand a pension reform which is nothing other than the cancellation of the 13th monthly pension and want to transform agricultural subsidies, thereby reducing or taking away the agricultural subsidies of 160,000 to 170,000 Hungarian farmers, he listed.
The question is not who is prime minister, but what consequences this will have for the people, he stressed. He warned that those who are in cahoots with Brussels today will implement these programmes, regardless of what they say. If a puppet government is successfully installed, they will send their instructions and we will have to implement Brussels’ plans, he indicated.
The scope for manoeuvre in our economic policy is primarily determined by whether the war will escalate or not. If President Donald Trump wins and returns, the threat of the escalation of the war will be reduced to almost zero, he argued. If this does not happen, the present situation will remain: not only is there a war in Ukraine, but there is a continual threat of escalation, and this requires a different economic policy because in that case we will have to spend a higher percentage of the gross domestic product on military expenditures, he observed.
The Prime Minister pointed out that, also from an economic point of view, we have a vested interest in an administration in the United States which lays down that this war cannot escalate any further. If we have that, then it is our turn: we have put together a package with which we will finally be able to take the Hungarian economy out of the difficult period we have been in since 2020, he said. He recalled that all the way until 2019 the Hungarian economy had been on a steady upward course. This was then interrupted by Covid, next came the war, the sanctions and inflation. We must find a way out of this difficult period of 4 to 5 years, and I believe that we have that, he indicated.
If we stand firmly on the foundations of economic neutrality, the policy we put together, the action plan consisting of 20 to 25 measures could yield fantastic results as well as an economic growth above all other European countries in 2025, he added.
Regarding wages, he stressed that they were not determined by the government. However, negotiations between employers and workers are making good progress,
I think we will have a 1 million-forint average wage within the foreseeable future, and in the next few years we will also be able to push the minimum wage to a height of around 400,000 forints as part of a multiannual pay agreement,
he stated.
Mr Orbán also spoke about the national consultation, describing its goal as the reinforcement of the foundations. In the struggles against Brussels, there is only one thing he can refer to: the will of the Hungarian people. If the Hungarian people say that they want economic neutrality, an independent Hungarian economic policy based on that, a higher growth, and that we should use that in order to achieve higher wages and to address housing issues, if we have that, we are able to defend it, he said. He stressed that the national consultation reinforced Hungary because it reinforced the government and also reinforced its economic policy. This is how we created one million new jobs, while migration was not stopped by the government alone, beforehand the Hungarian people stated their expectations, he recalled in reference to earlier national consultations.
In the context of migration, he recalled that the Brussels bureaucrats and a few large states behind them said the migration pact was good and its implementation had to be accelerated. Regrettably, the Hungarian opposition – with the exception of Mi Hazánk – too voted for this, approving Hungary’s penalisation and the EU’s refusal to provide us with grants for the purposes of border protection. The MEPs of Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People’s Party fought well, but we were not enough in the European Parliament. Perhaps, we will be more successful in the European Council, he observed. The struggle between pro-migration and anti-migration forces is ongoing, but the ratios are changing in our favour, and so we have high hopes, Mr Orbán said in summary.
