Orbán: liberal world press, George Soros and Brussels bureaucrats are the opponents

If the left wing wins Sunday’s general election, it will give the green light to weapons deliveries to Ukraine the next day, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on the campaign trail on Friday.

Orbán said the opposition also backed proposals to cut off Russian gas and oil supplies. Campaigning in Székesfehérvár, in central Hungary, he accused the opposition of having “already struck a deal with the Ukrainians”.

Furthermore, Orbán insisted the opposition was widely blamed for foul play, but

the scale of their election fraud this time, he added, was “unprecedented”.

He charged the opposition with collecting the personal data of millions of Hungarians illegally and holding it abroad, before returning it to Hungary and bombarding Hungarians with unsolicited messages. “This amounts to obvious and unambiguous election fraud,” he said. “Nevertheless, we must tackle this obstacle course and win the election,” Orban added.

Referring to the October 23 pro-government Peace March, the prime minister said: “Our strongest weapon lies in cooperation and our reliance on one another; this is our true hinterland.” “If we fight together we can break through the thickest wall,” he said,

listing Fidesz opponents as “the liberal world press, all Uncle Gyuri’s [George Soros] activists and the plethora of Brussels bureaucrats.”

The prime minister said that Fidesz had initially focused its campaign on the question of “whether Hungary should return to the failed past or continue the work started twelve years ago.” He said the path to victory was to convince the public that

Ferenc Gyurcsány, the former Socialist prime minister, was “still the boss and that our opponents haven’t changed”.

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“But a war broke out in the meantime and changed everything, including our campaign,” Orbán said. The issue then became making a choice between “war and peace”, the prime minister said, adding he believed that everybody in Hungary was “on the side of peace”, irrespective of their party affiliation.

Everyone, he said, would see it as a war between two other nations.

“And since we are Hungarians, our job is to stay out of it,”

he said, adding that “only the national side” could guarantee this. “The left wing believes that Ukraine is fighting our war, which is wrong,” he said. “This is not our war; we cannot win anything, but we could lose everything,” Orbán said, adding that the only way for Hungary to stay out of the war was by not sending weapons or troops to Ukraine, and by not allowing the transit of weapons across the country’s territory.

He said the risks associated with the ongoing war in Ukraine was “incomparably greater” than those of the Yugoslav War in 1999, noting that Russia is a nuclear power.

• Read also: Opposition: ‘Orbán has driven Hungary into crisis’

The Ukrainian president’s efforts to involve as many European countries as possible in the war must be taken “with understanding”, he said, because those aim to mitigate or even avoid defeat, adding that the governing parties’ dispute was not with Ukraine but with the Hungarian opposition, which, he insisted, “has already reached an agreement with the Ukrainians behind our backs”.

Orbán said that if the opposition won Sunday’s election, they would start sending weapons to Ukraine the next day and

back proposals to turn off the taps of Russian pipelines supplying gas and oil to Hungary.

“We must not allow this; we must protect Hungary’s interests,” Orban said, adding that any sanctions on energy deliveries would paralyze Hungary.

“There would be fuel shortages, factories would have to close down, and many people would lose their jobs,” he said. “Our hearts are with the Ukrainians,” Orbán said, adding however that Hungary must stand up for its interests and keep out of the war.

“Hungary has so far provided assistance to close to 600,000 refugees,”

the prime minister said. “This is why Ferenc Gyurcsány is wrong in saying that Hungary is ‘a crap country’. We are a great country that is offering help and providing all the care possible to those who are fleeing from trouble,” said Orbán.