Zsolt Törőcsik: The Copenhagen EU summit has once again shown that in the assessment of the Russo–Ukrainian war there’s a serious divergence between the mainstream in Brussels and the Hungarian leadership. While Brussels believes that Ukraine can defeat Russia with Western help, the Hungarian government believes in a negotiated solution. One of the topics I’ll be asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán about is whether this contradiction can be resolved. Good morning.
Good morning.
The Americans now seem to be more willing than ever to send ever more powerful weapons to Ukraine; so why do you think the Brussels plans to defeat Russia are unfeasible?
Perhaps it’s important to say that in the EU this isn’t about a divergence of opinion: the question isn’t who thinks what, but who wants to do what. So here opinions imply actions, deeds. And when others say, “This is our war, Ukraine is our first line of defence, therefore we’re at war, therefore Ukraine must be supported”, then that means that Ukraine really must be supported. So we shouldn’t make statements to the major world newspapers, but we must send weapons, we must send money, maybe later we must send people, and we must support the continuation of the fighting – as a result of which hundreds and thousands are dying every day. So this isn’t a debate of opinions, and now we’ve moved beyond who thinks what; the question here is what we do. Now my position is that the European war strategy – which was presented again in Copenhagen – is based on a mistake. The European war strategy states that the Russians will run out of economic resources – in plain language money – sooner than we will. Their argument is that, while the Russians are doing very well now, their situation will deteriorate, they won’t have enough money to produce weapons at the rate they’re doing now. We’ll be able to continue giving the Ukrainians a lot of money, and consequently weapons, and the Russians will collapse economically – and there might even be uprisings in Russia. Therefore economic collapse will force the Russians to abandon their war goals, and they’ll withdraw. And after they’ve withdrawn the Ukrainians will be able to reoccupy those territories – this is one fifth of the country by the way. This is the European war plan. Every day hundreds or thousands of people are dying, every day we’re burning through many hundreds of millions of euros – in the end billions. And there’s the constant risk that we Europeans will be drawn deeper and deeper into this war; and in the end those who want to send soldiers will prevail – because if it’s our war, then why aren’t we fighting? So the entire European Union strategy has serious consequences for the whole of Europe. Yet no matter how much I’ve insisted, pressed and confronted them, this strategy doesn’t clarify two questions: those of how long this will last and how much it will cost. So if you have a war strategy, you need to know for how many years you’ll be able to keep it going. So when will the Russians collapse? Next month, in six months, in a year, in three years, in four years? How long will the war last, and how many will die? Ten thousand, one hundred thousand, five hundred thousand? And how much will it cost us? So far we’ve spent about 170–180 billion euros. Meanwhile Europe is in serious economic trouble, and we need every penny. So far we’ve spent 175–180 billion euros, and every year we’d have to spend 40, 50 or 60 billion euros – over and over again. All the while we have no money. So this strategy has no logical, rational basis, and it has no financial basis: we want to defeat the enemy by outlasting them with money and economic power, but we’re unable to finance this war. This is all a mirage, an illusion – it will collapse, and this will have serious consequences. Moreover, it’s also unprecedented – even in the history of wars – for the opposing parties to not negotiate with each other. The Americans are negotiating with the Russians, but we, the Europeans, aren’t – even though the war is here on the European continent. So the Hungarian position is that we should strive for a ceasefire, strive for peace, and have continuous, medium-, lower- or higher-level diplomatic contacts and negotiations [with Russia] from among Europe and the EU. So let’s start negotiating.
How is it received when behind closed doors or in the corridors you raise these questions on negotiation and your doubts?
I’m in the process of becoming part of the majority. So today we stand alone on the stage, with the Slovaks sometimes alongside us, with others in tune with us on this or that specific issue. But based on non-public discussions I can say that an increasing number of countries feel the same way as Hungary does: that we’ll drift into a war, and sooner or later our coffins will come home, with our dead, with our fallen youth in them. This danger is growing, and they don’t want to take it on. Moreover, most European countries are in huge economic trouble. So we shouldn’t be thinking about the same conditions as in Hungary, where we cut taxes, and we launch a first home purchase programme, and mothers don’t pay personal income tax. In Hungary there’s an attacking, offensive economic policy building up a multitude of expanding economic programmes. But that’s not the case in the West. There they have recession, contraction, rising utility bills, rising energy prices and declining economic performance. So they’re in a worse situation – even though they’re richer than us, they’re in a worse situation, and there’s even less money there to send to Ukraine. That’s why the idea has come up of taking the Russian money that they’ve frozen, money that’s the property of the Russians – taking it from the Russians, and using it against the Russians. So when people are in trouble they tend to come up with desperate ideas like that; and it’s from these increasingly desperate European ideas that I see we’re in serious trouble.
Yesterday you said that in Copenhagen there were three proposals on the table: one for the EU to recognise the conflict as its own war; the second for financial support, which we’ve talked about; but the third was for EU accession [of Ukraine]. There was a preliminary plan to bypass your veto on opening the accession chapters, but you rejected that. Has that been taken off the agenda, or is it still live? How serious is the EU’s intention in this regard?
I think that the intention is serious, but here we need to go back to basics, like novice dancers, to understand what’s at stake here, and to understand where we made a mistake in the dance steps. So the European Union is a joint organisation of twenty-seven Member States. A new country can be admitted here if all twenty-seven of us agree. If any country decides that it doesn’t want to admit an applicant country, because – for whatever reason – it doesn’t want to exist with them in a form of integration, say, in the European Union community, then it has the right to reject it. So the situation isn’t that twenty-six want something and the twenty-seventh has to accept it, but that individually each one has the right to decide for their own people on whether they want to be in a common union with another people. So Hungarians don’t need to care about what the other twenty-six say. We need to care about our own opinion, we need to know what Hungarians want. And, after we asked them and we were all able to express our opinion, Hungarians don’t want to be in a European Union with Ukrainians. I strongly agree with this, because if you’re in an alliance system with someone you share their fate. Ukraine is a country with a very difficult fate. Why should we share that difficult fate? We have our own fate, which is much easier than the Ukrainians’. Let’s help them as much as our strength allows, that’s fine. But why should we take on someone else’s bad fate, like a bad set of clothes? That’s a childish idea, like in some romantic films when people aged 13, 14 or 15 think that it would be nice to put themselves in the shoes and clothes of people with difficult fates and bear the same difficult fate. But why would it be nice when we can manage without doing that? We feel sorry for them, we sympathise with them, they’re fighting heroically and we support them, but we don’t want to share their fate. Their fate is that they live next to Russia and are constantly at war with the Russians. We can’t change that. And it’s of no help if we take on everything they suffer from. I want to spare Hungary from the prospect of being in an alliance system with the Ukrainians, whereby if we accept them in, we’ll also be at war with the Russians. I’ll say it again: if you’re in an alliance system with someone and it’s attacked, then sooner or later soldiers will have to be sent. And we don’t want to die for Ukraine. Let’s make that clear! We want to give as much money as we’re able to – but not in the sense that they’re members of the Union, whereby they’ll also get some of Hungary’s money because they’re in trouble. We shall decide whether we want to give, and how much. But they can’t claim the right to take money out of the pockets of Hungarians because they need it. If they’re members, then that’s how it will be – we’ll have to share each other’s economic fate. So I suggest that we conclude a strategic agreement with the Ukrainians, help them, and that there should be an agreement between the Union and the Ukrainians. This isn’t unprecedented: there’s one with the British and there’s one with the Turks. But let’s not take them in. We have the right to ensure this, and no matter what they come up with, they cannot change it, because the Hungarians – like all other peoples – have the right to this.
In Copenhagen you also announced that you’d initiate a petition against Brussels’ war plans. But there’s already been a vote this year, clearly on the EU – on Ukraine’s membership of the EU. How would this current petition be different, and what’s the purpose of it?
First of all, this is a difficult matter. Let’s not dodge the issue: we’re not Tisza-ites, so let’s speak frankly. Hungary is divided on this issue, on the issue of Ukraine’s membership of the European Union. I didn’t expect this either, but this is the situation: Tisza organised a party referendum on this issue, on whether Tisza supporters support Ukraine’s membership of the European Union. And if I remember correctly, 58 per cent answered “yes”. Now of course we can calculate Tisza’s nationwide support, and what 58 per cent of it is – but no matter how we calculate it, it’s certainly several hundred thousand people. And then I think we have to count DK [Democratic Coalition] members there too. We don’t know what their support is, because you can’t believe any poll these days, but if they have 4–5 per cent support that also means a few hundred thousand people. So everyone in Hungary – you and I included – should acknowledge that there may be a lot of us who agree with the very simple reasoning that Ukraine’s accession would mean Ukraine bringing in war and taking out Hungarian money, but a lot of Hungarians think that this is worth taking on. There are hundreds of thousands of them! So I think we should acknowledge that in Hungary this issue is a matter of ongoing political struggle. If there’s a national government, then we won’t go to war, we won’t send our money there. If Tisza or DK form a government, which would be pro-Brussels governments, then we’ll go to war and send money there. So this is an internal debate that needs to be settled. This is what’s at stake in every election, perhaps one of the most important things – or the most important thing – at stake. Now, that’s the question of membership. The other question is the war. So there’s a war plan which says that there’s a solution to the war on the front line, and one should give energy, money and weapons to the Ukrainians so that they can win this. Alternatively, we say that there should be a diplomatic solution: there’s no solution on the battlefield, the conflict cannot be decided militarily – that can be seen, as this has been going on for three or four years. So let’s have negotiations and try to reach an agreement. Now that we’ll be under continuous pressure in these negotiations on the issue of the war, meaning that I’ll personally be under pressure, it’s important for the Hungarians to continuously confirm their opinion that they don’t want a European Union war strategy – or if there is one, that we don’t want to participate in it. Without such national unity – that is, without national unity against war – it will be very difficult to keep Hungary out of the war. I know that not everyone reads history in the morning when they’re taking their children to school or going to work, and I don’t want to burden people with the difficulties of my own work, but let’s not forget that we wanted to stay out of two world wars: we failed to stay out of the first or the second, because our leaders wanted to stay out, but they failed in that. I’m looking for a way and a means to enable us to avoid that path – to enable us to stay out of it. But in order for me to be able to successfully represent this position, there needs to be very strong national unity in Hungary. I’ll be representing a different government position and representing a different national position in an international space. I don’t need this in a spiritual sense: I have a wife, I have children, and they’ll strengthen me spiritually at home. What I need is political backing, so that I can unequivocally stand up to anyone and make it clear that we Hungarians don’t support any war strategy and we won’t participate in it, that we’ll stay out of this war.
We’ll return to the internal debates later, but in one of your answers you mentioned personal income tax exemption for mothers with three children. From Wednesday they won’t have to pay personal income tax. What’s the main purpose of this measure? Strengthening the financial situation of families, building a strong middle class? Or reversing the demographic trend, which perhaps seems to be the most difficult task?
At the end of it all, there’s a very simple idea: if not enough children are born, we’ll fade away. A country of one hundred million doesn’t run that risk, because there are so many of them – or a Türkiye with ninety million, or even a Germany of eighty-one million. But this risk is a live one for Hungarians in Hungary, who are now fewer than ten million. If I add up all the Hungarians in the world, there are no more than fifteen million of us, and here I’m giving a very generous estimate. So at the size we are, every generation in which the number of children being born is fewer than the number of people dying represents a life-threatening danger. We don’t usually think about this every morning when we take our children to school or go to work, but if we sit down and calmly think about the future of our own community, the future of our children and grandchildren, then we need to see that a shrinking country cannot be successful. So when you shrink, the members of the community that’s also shrinking will fare worse and worse. So the existential question of how many of us there are in Hungary is both on a historical horizon, and – due to the economy – in the short term. There are two options related to this now. There’s the Western path. Not enough children are being born there, and they’re bringing in migrants: little by little, there’s one fewer German or one fewer French person, and then one Muslim comes in. That’s also a path that can be chosen. I wouldn’t advise Hungarians to take that path. Others have tried that before us. We handled this well, we kept our heads down, we didn’t let in foreigners, we observed what happened to those who did; and what we see now in Western Europe isn’t attractive, so I don’t recommend copying it. But then you need your own children. Now this is a private matter, because the state has no say in how many children someone has. Everyone is the captain of their own life. One thing we can do is to support those mothers who commit to having at least two children, so that each one and their husband will be replaced by their two children, so they’re maintaining our community. We recognise them, we support them, and just because they’ve had two children we won’t allow them to live worse than those who haven’t had children. This is because on the one hand that isn’t fair. But we can go beyond that, because there are many unfair things in life: on top of that, it’s extremely detrimental to the community. So we must appreciate, acknowledge, support and encourage those who are willing to raise children – it’s their private matter, but at the same time it’s in the interest of the community. This is why I’ll use every economic means possible to help families, to help families with children. This is the essence of our economic policy philosophy. I belong to a community that shares the opinion – and in fact, as a result of the work of recent years, I think the majority of Hungary shares the opinion – that families should be supported. This is a family-friendly country. We love children and we regret that there are so few of them. Yet the Government isn’t here to regret, but to help people to have more of them. So there’s a social aspect to this, there’s justice, there’s family support, and there’s demography. I think that if Hungary has money, and will have it in the future, it should first be spent on helping families.
Well, this is the interesting question, so let’s return to the debates – because according to many economists associated with the Tisza Party, Hungary doesn’t have the money, and it’s too generous for mothers with even two children to receive personal income tax exemption. At the same time that party officially talks about maintaining benefits, and even cutting taxes further. Who should voters believe in this situation?
The Tisza Party isn’t worth paying attention to, because they’ve announced that they won’t say what they’re preparing to do. Everyone was able to hear and see this with their own ears and eyes, and I saw it too: the vice-president of the Tisza Party said that they cannot say what they’re preparing to do, because then they’ll lose: “There’s no need to talk about this, we need to win the election, and after that anything is possible.” With this the Tisza Party has removed itself from the list of parties that can be taken seriously, or for which there’s any hope of understanding their intentions from what they say – because they’ve clearly said that they won’t tell the truth. It’s a sneaky, underhanded party. There are such parties, this isn’t unprecedented, I don’t like it, but it’s not an unknown phenomenon. So they’re underhanded. What we know is the following. Does the Hungarian economy have money? You can tell this from the fact that it has a budget. So every year, in a public debate, Parliament creates the country’s budget: how much revenue there is, how much expenditure there is, where the money comes from, and what it’s spent on. Everyone can see this. From this, you can see whether there’s money for programmes such as tax cuts. And from this it’s clear that for this year and next year – and then we’ll see – there’s enough money in the budget for what we’re now spending on family support. So the position that there’s no money isn’t true. The debate is about what to spend this money on. And Tisza, the liberals and DK constantly want to abolish the bank tax and reduce the tax on multinationals. Brussels demands this, by the way, so this is a strong triple alliance: Brussels, DK, Tisza. And they think that if they reduce the tax on multinationals and banks, then they’ll need replace the lost revenue, so they’ll take it from families! So they’ve always sided with the multinationals and the banks against the families. And now there’s another twist: Brussels wants to make us raise taxes, because ever more money is needed due to the Ukrainian war. There’s no money. The EU can’t support Ukraine because it doesn’t have enough money. Where will it get the money? It can take it from the Member States. They want to oblige us to accept that a quarter or a fifth – but rather a quarter – of the budget should go to Ukraine. This is what the EU budget for the next seven years ahead of us is also about. This is possible if it’s taken from families and the money is given to Ukraine: it’s that simple. And since DK has always been pro-Brussels, and Tisza itself is a Brussels project or a Brussels-founded party, a political movement expressing Brussels’ intentions, they’ll naturally always support what Brussels asks for.
Yesterday a new video also revealed what the Tisza Party is planning – or may be planning. Zoltán Tarr said this: “It’s not certain that we need to maintain that many hospital beds for the same type of care as now, and it’s not certain that we need that kind of elementary school.” What do you read into these sentences?
Well, I’ve been a Member of Parliament since 1990, and that means I’ve been involved in budget debates for thirty-five years. So I’ve argued at least thirty-five times in heated situations about what should be done in the Hungarian economy, about how much money we have, about how much of it the state should bring into the budget, and what it should spend on. I’ve heard it all. So for me, when I look back at these thirty-five years, it’s clear that there are only two positions, and the people who represent these positions always appear, again and again. So while I consider György Surányi a good economist or an educated economist, he constantly appears – sometimes behind the Bokros Package [of the mid-1990s], sometimes behind Tisza, sometimes here, sometimes there. Péter Ákos Bod is here, sometimes there. So there are these economists. There’s András Kármán, who I removed from the Government around 2011, and who’s now their lead economic expert – a banker paid from abroad. I know them all like bad pennies. So they’ve always argued that Hungary needs an economy that gives a lot of money to multinationals, doesn’t tax banks, doesn’t impose special taxes, and that creates economic balance by increasing the burden on families. Entering this now is Brussels, whose interests are tied to this being the case. Together they form a very strong intellectual and political bloc, which sometimes comes to power in Hungary. But then we beat them soundly, we come in, and then we restore family-friendly policies. But this is “either-or”: these are the only two options Hungary faces.
Well, because of these things the Government is launching a national consultation. The questions are very diverse, ranging from the flat-rate personal income tax to various tax benefits, exemptions, from corporate tax to the reduction of household utility bills. Beyond the economic and political aspects, what impact would the abolition or transformation of these have on the everyday lives of families?
There’s a common root to all this. In fact this is a national consultation, and all five questions go back to the root of what public burden sharing should be like in Hungary. And the most important questions of public burden sharing can be formulated as they are in the national consultation. Once more, the national consultation is an instrument that’s appropriate for discussing certain issues with one another. So let’s be the ones to talk about it if Tisza are dodging the questions and don’t want to speak about it openly, but just blurt out here and there that they’d close hospitals, close schools, take away corporate tax support for sport because they think we spend too much on sport, take money away from culture, and take money away from families. They don’t want to talk about it. Well, let’s talk about it! Public burden sharing is the most important issue for the Hungarian future, and we say that we’re giving the money produced by the Hungarian economy to families. Let’s take as little money as possible from people. The good thing is for as much as possible to remain with them, the rates should be low, and what we collect as taxes should be given back to families first.
Let’s talk about one more topic. We don’t have much time, but together with Slovak prime minister Robert Fico you celebrated the 130th anniversary of the opening of the Mária Valéria Bridge. This is also interesting because we’ve come to this from a point sixteen years ago, when the then President of Hungary, László Sólyom, had to turn back on the same bridge after Robert Fico barred him from entering Slovakia. What did it take for the world to change so much in the relationship between the two countries in sixteen years?
Brussels. This is the answer. So today Brussels is taking away the powers of the Member States. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian or Croatian – it’s taking away the powers of every nation. Continuously. In the economy, in the matter of EU membership, it’s trying to outmanoeuvre the Member States. It’s centralising. In the matter of education. This is nothing to do with them! According to the Constitution, education is a national responsibility; but they have a say in it if they don’t like our universities, then they also have a say in how parents raise their children – they have a say in that too, because they consider gender and the awareness-raising provided by gender activists in schools to be a matter of personal freedom. So Brussels is coming into our lives, into every nation, and every nation is protesting against this. Of course, the biggest ones aren’t protesting so much, because they’re behind Brussels – but that’s another conversation. But the ones that are the same size as us, let’s say, the countries of the region, are all fighting to protect their own sovereignty, their own rights, and to be able to represent the interests of their own people. And in this, we – Slovaks and Hungarians – are rowing in the same boat. And this is why in recent years we’ve worked very hard to reduce the weight of contentious issues between us and to increase the areas of agreement – which is why today there’s much more agreement than dispute between Slovakia and Hungary. So if László Sólyom were alive today – God rest his soul! – he’d be able to walk across the bridge that he wasn’t able to walk across more than ten years ago.
Among the topics I’ve been asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán about were the Copenhagen EU summit, personal income tax exemption for mothers with three children, and the national consultation.
