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Mr Orbán said the Constitution is clear, the elections must be held in April or May, according to the decision of the president of the republic. No one can withdraw or restrict the right of the head of state to appoint the date of the elections, but we must prepare, he stated. He pointed out that political parties prepared in such a way as to be fully armoured by the earliest possible date. Therefore, when they think about the possible date of the elections, they always aim for the earliest possible date. Next year – as the first weekend of April is Easter when no elections are allowed to be held – the earliest possible date is the second weekend of April.
“This is what we reckon with, and then the president will decide,” Mr Orbán stated. He said Fidesz effectively has all its candidates, there are only 3 or 4 places out of the 106 constituencies where the leadership has not yet decided.
In answer to a question, Mr Orbán also spoke about the fact that he received the T-shirt that he wore in Tusnádfürdő from the Hungarians of Croatia; the T-shirt featured the expected date of the 2026 elections and a four-fifths majority. This is a Hungarian invention from Croatia, that’s how they know it there, he said.
The programme of spokesperson for the Fidesz Group in Parliament Balázs Németh – which was broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook – revealed that it was Mr Orbán’s idea to launch a programme like this, the purpose of which is to stop “the spread of fake news at the earliest possible moment in time,” and to discuss important topics.
Regarding the tariff agreement between the United States of America and the European Union, based on the information released so far, the Prime Minister took the view that this is not an agreement, but more like that US President Donald Trump had President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen “for breakfast.” Mr Orbán said they suspected this in advance. The US president is a heavyweight negotiator, while the President of the European Commission is a featherweight. The position of the US president is much more self-confident, while that of the Commission president is always fragile.
The Prime Minister said the Americans recently concluded a similar agreement with Britain which was much better than this. The European agreement is worse than the British. Therefore, it will be difficult to present this later as a success, he said in summary.
Additionally, there is the problem that the parties allegedly agreed that the Europeans would take capital worth hundreds of billions of euros to America. But who will? Mr Orbán asked the question, pointing out that the Commission has no capital. On whose behalf did the president conclude such an agreement? Will the German chancellor or the French president take the money there, or will the Hungarian prime minister send capital there? he asked.
He further said Europe will allegedly buy weapons worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But who will do so? The Commission has no army, Mr Orbán stressed, indicating that the same question emerges in connection with energy. The positions were not equal, the president of the Commission had a difficult job, the Prime Minister concluded.
He said the Fight Club now has thirty thousand members, while forty thousand persons have applied to join the digital civic circles. He added that earlier, for 15 to 20 years, the reasonable civic attitude in politics was not to respond to evident enormous lies so as not to amplify the volume of the falsity. However, since the digital world conquered politics, the people have been prepared to regard even the most outlandish claims as probable, and therefore, unless they respond immediately, the given lie conquers the Internet, he argued.
“Therefore, we thought […] that it would be good idea to have a place where you can relay the message straight away, first thing in the morning, that ‘people, this is nonsense, this is rubbish, this is fake,’ while in contrast, this is the reality, the truth,” he stated. He said he proposed the establishment of digital civic circles because today the Internet, the digital space is a hostile territory. If “a non-liberal, non-left-wing person” goes up there to state their opinion, they will encounter digital aggression. He added that now that the digital space had become such an important platform in people’s lives, they could not allow this atmosphere and these people to dominate it exclusively.
“We, too, must go up there, I refer to this as a ‘digital conquest.’ Civic, national, normal, peaceful, guileless people who in actual fact only mean well, too, must have a place in that space, and it’s important that they should be able to defend themselves against aggression on the Internet,” he argued.
Mr Orbán said if people face aggression on the Internet, they tend to say ‘I’d rather withdraw, I will not go up there,’ but if they do so, then “the civic, national, country-building composure and thinking will be forced out of this space.” This is a great loss for the country, and is disadvantageous for them also politically, he pointed out.
He said so far more than six hundred persons have applied to organise digital civic circles, adding that people in Budapest are planning to establish a civic circle called ‘Let’s replan Budapest’ because they take the view that Budapest is stuck in “ground floor-level debates” and fails to identify overarching plans. All the members of these civic circles will be nationally inclined people who regard their country as important, who want to build it, rather than destroy it, and who want their country to have a future, the Prime Minister stressed.
On the show, the host presented multiple claims by opposition politician-independent Member of Parliament Ákos Hadházy made in connection with the prime minister, including the claim that the prime minister keeps zebras in Hatvanpuszta. Regarding this, Mr Orbán said he is grateful to musician Győző Gáspár for having turned this affair into a joke. He observed that he had a house in Felcsút, the agricultural centre under construction – which was not yet operational – in Hatvanpuszta belonged to his father, while Mr Hadházy recorded a video of zebras in Bicske.
Regarding his Tusványos programme, Mr Orbán said he travelled on an army plane because he was on an official visit. He indicated that whenever he travelled privately, he used scheduled services – if only low cost airline services are available, using those – while whenever he travelled to attend state visits, he always used state planes. He observed that an exception to this rule could be if the Counter Terrorism Centre guaranteeing the security of protected persons decided that while the trip in question was a private one, the prime minister was nonetheless required to use a protected service. However, this has not happened yet.
The Prime Minister dismissed claims that the government would maintain its power even with means of the police if the government parties did not win in next year’s parliamentary elections as nonsense and rubbish. He added that this topic emerged before every election, but no one seemed to care that in Hungarian politics he was the only person who had both won and lost elections.
On the programme, a video was shown of a concert where members of the audience chanted ‘filthy Fidesz.’ “It was not convincing,” Mr Orbán said, reacting to the footage, adding that he usually asks his colleagues to take a look at opposition rallies on the basis of drone recordings because they reveal that “the enormous opposition growth, flood or what-not is, in actual fact, nothing more than a collection of small groups, but if you take a picture from head height, it looks impressive.”
In response to a comment received mid-show, asking the Prime Minister why he does not debate with President of the Tisza Party Péter Magyar, Mr Orbán confirmed his position stated earlier that he did not debate with “mercenaries in foreign pay,” and did not attend programmes where journalists or media outlets were paid from abroad. “I don’t know how many times Péter Magyar will challenge me, but he will always receive the same answer: I debate with his masters, with the puppeteer who controls him, with von der Leyen, Mr Weber and several other European bureaucrats. I debate with them every week, however,” he pointed out.
The Prime Minister also said on the one-hour-long programme that he will only go on leave in the second half of August as at that time of year, the Brussels bureaucrats, too, go on holiday. Therefore, he hopes that “the pressure and heat” in politics will abate then.
In answer to a commenter’s question, the Prime Minister spoke about the 3 per cent housing loan programme to be launched in the autumn, and recommended to everyone who wanted to obtain a home of their own to browse the information on the Home Start Programme because that was a great opportunity. If the programme proves its worth, then “we will be the first country in Europe which makes independent housing possible for young people coming of age not just theoretically, but also specifically,” he said.
Mr Orbán drew attention to the fact that a middle-aged couple, too, can avail themselves of the credit facility if they have one property which they own 50-50 per cent. If only one of them buys a home, housing for one child is taken care of, if the other one, too, buys a home, housing for two children is taken care of, he detailed.
In answer to a question related to opinion polls, Mr Orbán said a “vulnerable” Hungarian may think that a given survey reflects the situation that exists at the time of the survey. However, they are wrong because – “as we know this from [pollster] Endre Hann himself” – some surveys are used as an instrument to support the ongoing campaign, he said, adding that if a party pays for the services of an opinion research institute, throughout the western world, they are prepared to unashamedly construe the numbers in a way which indicates that the balance of power favours one party, rather than the other.
The Prime Minister indicated that he relied on their own surveys, though he did not claim that they were flawless. “At present, this is how we see the situation, this is how we stand. And maths is in our favour,” he said in connection with the fact that in his speech in Tusnádfürdő he said that at an election to be held this Sunday, they would win in 80 of the 106 constituencies.
In Mr Orbán’s view, the Tisza Party has accepted the EU migration pact which would mean that Brussels would decide who may enter Hungary. The Prime Minister recalled: he remembers from a year to eighteen months ago that during every one of his speeches, Péter Magyar “enthusiastically cheered and applauded the Hungarian path from the first row;” now, however, as president of Tisza, he is advocating for a different path.
He warned that if someone claimed to be a European politician and wanted to reach a compromise with the European Commission, a pre-condition was to accept the migration pact. This is what Tisza itself speaks about, “except you need a good ear to hear it,” Mr Orbán said. He stressed that the acceptance of the migration pact meant that we would have to build refugee camps for tens of thousands of people – this obligation also exists now, but Hungary is not willing to fulfil it. At the same time, we would also have to accept that if a large number of migrants come to Europe, it is decided in Brussels how many and which ones of them should come to Hungary. The migration pact would be the end of Hungary, he pointed out, adding that we must come to an agreement with Brussels, but rather than from a position of self-surrender, from the position of the national interest.
In the context of migration and the fact that France would recognise an independent Palestinian state, he warned that terrorism and crime were one of the dimensions of migration, while another one was its impact on democracy. If the percentage of Muslim voters increases in a country compared with the number of Jewish voters, the government of that country will pursue a pro-Palestine and pro-Islam policy. “That’s how the numbers work out, this is democracy, and then the Jews can pack up and leave,” he added, drawing attention to the fact that this has already happened in several Western European countries.
Mr Orbán described the two-state solution as an illusion, and took the view that keeping this on the agenda prevented the agreements that could be reached. He added that we could speak of an independent Palestinian state if each of the two parties accepted the other, but today this was not the situation, and as a result, Israel did not want a two-state solution.
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