We must prevent the Europeans from marching into the Russo-Ukrainian war, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated on Friday on Kossuth Radio’s programme ‘Good morning Hungary.’
Mr Orbán said today the primary problem is no longer that there is a Russo-Ukrainian war which is the root of all the problems. The real problem is that the Europeans have decided to go to war. He said the Europeans have made and continue to make decisions which are about building a wartime enemy and inflicting a military defeat on Russia through Ukraine; they are about long-term plans and an armament programme which will cost us an arm and a leg. The whole of Europe wants to go to war, the Prime Minister stressed, adding that we must turn back from the street which has proved to be a dead-end in European politics.
He added that the American peace proposal or the ceasefire or peace concluding the Russo-Ukrainian war was no longer just about saving lives perishing on the front and putting an end to burning money in an unwinnable war, but also about preventing the Europeans from going to war.
The Prime Minister said he already composed his reply to President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen who asked for further funds from the Member States to finance the war in Ukraine. His reply is not just an outright rejection, but in it he also stated his reasons and made proposals. He said he has not yet sent the reply because Minister for European Union Affairs János Bóka was in America this week, and he would like to consult with him regarding the reply not only on the telephone, but also in person. This has turned out to be a fine little letter, he said.
He pointed out that the Hungarian people’s money belonged to the Hungarian people, and we were not prepared to take large sums out of the Hungarian budget at the expense of family support, the pension system or the promotion of businesses and to hand them over to Brussels who would then send them to Ukraine where we had no idea what would happen to these sums.
He said Ursula von der Leyen’s other proposal is that “if you don’t give us money from your own budgets, we should take a loan out together.” This means that not only do we have to take a large sum out of the present budget, but we would also have to take large sums out of our grandchildren’s budgets every year.
He described the third proposal of the President of the European Commission – using the seized Russian currency reserves for war purposes – as absurd, adding that this would compromise the international system of the management of currency reserves, but most certainly its European leg at any rate. Therefore, we are unable to support it, he stated.
In summary, he said Ursula von der Leyen’s letter is a financial version committed to writing of the intention entitled “We Europeans are going to war.”
In continuation he said it was against this background that late last night it was officially confirmed that there is a twenty-eight-point American peace plan which the Americans handed over and the Ukrainians officially took delivery of. This peace plan contains proposals which the Russians and the Americans already discussed on a preliminary basis.
The next two to three weeks will be crucial as the first reactions to the twenty-eight-point proposal will be released, and “something will start unfolding, the Budapest peace summit is approaching,” he said .
Regarding the corruption scandal in Ukraine, he indicated that we had learnt two things about the functioning of the Ukrainian wartime mafia. One of them is that large sums of money disappear and do not go to the places where they were sent by the Europeans and the Americans. The other one is, however, that Europe – while pouring money into Ukraine – has no control mechanism with which to track the money. He added that “in a normal situation if I give someone money, it is laid down in an agreement via which channels the sum will reach its beneficiary and at which points I as donor have the possibility to check whether the sum has been spent as agreed. But it seems that there is no such mechanism; in fact, we don’t even want there to be one,” he said.
The Prime Minister indicated that Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó had suggested at the General Affairs Council meeting of foreign ministers that if there was no such control mechanism, they should create one, or that they should perhaps suspend the transfer of further funds until they clarified whether they could track how the money was spent, but this proposal had been swept off the table.
Mr Orbán described as shocking the argument presented at the meeting of foreign ministers that the corruption scandal is yet another argument for Ukraine’s EU membership because if they were EU members, such scandals could be avoided. “This whole thing is so sick and absurd that you can’t find words,” he observed, adding that if he is not mistaken, what they propose is that if you cannot operate financial systems that function legally, we will admit you to a common financial system because if you are part of it, then you will not be able to cheat.
It is in response to this that the countries of the Western Balkans ask the question of whether they understand correctly that given that the Western Balkans, Serbia and the other countries have been unable to make any progress on the issue of EU membership for a decade and a half, while Ukraine, whose admission was not even on the agenda, suddenly jumped ahead of them on account of the war, does this mean that if they fabricated a war, their accession talks would also accelerate? And based on the same logic, if they also managed to fabricate some corruption, then would they be able to give the EU a further reason for admitting them more swiftly?
In Mr Orbán’s view, this line of argument clearly reflects desperation. It is perfectly evident that Ukraine is not and will not be in the foreseeable future in a state fit for being considered for European Union membership.
Mr Orbán said in addition to multiple minor issues, there is significant Hungarian resistance in European politics to two major issues, the issues of the war and migration. He stressed that this was a major battle in Brussels in which the Hungarian opposition, DK [Democratic Coalition] and Tisza, too, were on Brussels’ side.
In his opinion, the Hungarian government finds itself confronted in Brussels not just by the other European countries, but also by DK and Tisza who stand for a pro-war and pro-Ukraine position in the European Parliament.
The Prime Minister described DK’s case as “an old story,” adding that if there is a left-wing government in Hungary, then in actual fact, Brussels governs. However, he said in continuation, it is the same with the Tisza Party as it was, in his view, created in Brussels, that is also where it is financed from, and it has two tasks to complete: to break the Hungarians’ resistance on the issues of the war and migration.
“Therefore, there is no consensus here at home, and in Brussels we also find ourselves up against Hungarians, actors who claim to be Hungarians or define themselves as Hungarians which they have a right to, I don’t dispute that,” he said.
Mr Orbán recalled that Hungary had stayed out of migration on the basis of the “robust will of the people,” and so in his opinion, we must stay out of the war, too, on the basis of this experience. He warned that if there was no robust national unity behind the country’s leadership of the day, a strong commitment to peace, a national anti-war desire, then leaders were unable to keep the country out of the war. This will must be expressed and vocalised, he stressed, adding that the signature collection now under way and the national consultation are important as in his opinion these are about the fact that “the Hungarians’ money belongs to the Hungarian people,” Hungary does not want to go to war, wants to send neither soldiers, nor weapons, and likewise does not want to burn its money in Ukraine.
Regarding the economy, the Prime Minister said that since 2010 Hungary had pursued a successful patriotic economic policy that departed from the EU’s general economic line. In his view, the Hungarian economy differs from all other Western European economies on two substantial points: on the one hand, families, rather than individuals constitute its basis, and in Hungary full employment is a state goal, in contrast to other Western European countries.
We have organised an economic system which we are able to operate without migrants, by solely relying on Hungarians, at most, resorting from time to time and on a temporary basis to a limited number of guest workers, but this is a supplementary, rather than a substantial element, he underlined.
He highlighted that for the government the economy was about the people. He stressed that the Tisza Party’s economic “chief” was a banker who had been a member of a previous government of his, but they had parted ways because he had had banker notions about economic policy and had not supported the idea of sending the IMF packing or the introduction of family tax benefits “because he saw numbers, not people.”
He said the Tisza Party is like that, this is why they want to tax pensions, to increase the personal income tax and in general, based on a banker’s logic, to take more money away from the people in the interest of some pre-conceived, larger macro-economic financial stability. You can think like that, but this is another world, the world of the Left, he explained.
Mr Orbán pointed out that there must be financial balance and operating security, “but the financial system is not there for bankers to make a lot of money, but to have sufficient funds in the economy and so that those who want to work should have access to jobs, make a valuable contribution and live well.”
He added that it was Minister for the National Economy Márton Nagy’s duty to monitor the numbers, while for him as prime minister the key question is “what kind of a life grows out of this economy,” and in his view, this vision of the future is “much more attractive than what the Left could ever offer whether in Europe or in Hungary.”
Regarding the Tisza Party’s nomination of candidates, Mr Orbán said “this is a country in which two parties have always played and two parties will always play” a dominant role on the basis of the left and right division because there is no “quality personnel” for replenishing any more political forces. Our intellectual structure is based on this as well: there are patriotic people, they are on the Right, and there are the internationalists; there is no Moscow now, so they are people who want to serve Brussels, who hope for assistance from abroad, from the international Left, they are on the Left, he said. Observing them from our side, as in from the patriotic side, they are too left-wing, too pro-Brussels, too pro-Ukraine, and so consequently, they are left-wing, the Prime Minister said in answer to the question relating to the Tisza Party’s procedure for the nomination of candidates.
