Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview on Friday that he does not support a European Union budget that takes money away from farmers, research and development and regional development, and gives it to countries that take in migrants.
Speaking to public radio, Orbán said the EU budget negotiations were expected to take a long time and he noted that a joint budget for seven years must be unanimously agreed on.
“As long as Hungarians do not give the go-ahead, there’ll be no budget,” he said.
Migrants, he added, should not be given “a single cent” and the relevant support should be provided by member states from their own budget.
He added that he did not back curbing farm support.
Orbán to appoint three deputy PMs
Three deputy prime ministers will be appointed to the new government, Orbán said.
Interior Minister Sándor Pintér will be deputy prime minister in charge of a new centralised office that will also function as a unified intelligence service, and Mihály Varga will be deputy prime minister in charge of the national economy, he said. Zsolt Semjén will retain his post in a general capacity.
A new prime minister’s office in charge of policy enforcement will coordinate the work public administration state secretaries in other ministries.
The office will work together with the Government Control Office and the united intelligence service, Orbán said.
Meanwhile, Orbán also noted that a plan to amend the constitution to outlaw the relocation of migrants to Hungary will go ahead in the new government cycle.
Soros
The “Stop Soros” package of bills, which the government submitted before the April 8 election, is a related effort, he said.
“Soros’s shadow army should come out into the light,” Orbán said.
He said it was a “moral duty” to pass the anti-migration amendment that was not approved in 2016 because the opposition withheld its support.
Orbán said migration was not a matter of human rights but an issue of national security. Those in the government who handle migration issues should have access to the tools of national security, he said.
Non-Hungarian citizens who support illegal migration will be filtered out from the country, he said, referring to the “Stop Soros” bill.
Christian Democratic ideology
Orbán said the government’s goals had not changed and it would continue to protect Hungarian and Christian culture and it would not allow the country to be transferred to foreigners. It will work towards the goal of full employment, requiring a well-functioning economy, lower taxes and higher wages. In addition, families with children will carry on getting the support while the value of pensions will be maintained and raised if possible, he said.
Orbán said his government adhered to a Christian Democratic ideology.
“We are not building a liberal democracy but a Christian democracy in which human dignity comes first, the powers are separated, freedom is an absolute value, families are supported, global ideologies are rejected, there is faith in the importance of the nation, the government fights for full employment, the equality of women is respected and developments that lead to rising levels of anti-Semitism are prevented.”
Orbán said he regretted that his Fidesz party had won 133 rather than 134 seats in parliament. “As far as I can see the Kúria [Hungary’s supreme court] has stripped us of one mandate”, he said, referring to the Constitutional Court’s criticism on Thursday of the Kuria for declaring over 4,000 votes for the ruling parties invalid. He said, however, that “it has to be accepted” and noted that under Hungarian law there was no legal remedy against the Kúria’s decision. He also noted that the final result of the election would be announced later on Friday.
The prime minister said he could not envisage any “extraordinary development” in the near future that would “sap his energies from managing the government”. He said he would be in a position to “define important and concrete tasks and get them implemented”.
European budget
Concerning the European budget, Orbán said he would not support “one which would cut funds for farmers, research and development or regional development, and re-channel those funds to countries which have accommodated migrants”.
Orbán said the EU budget negotiations were expected to take a long time and he noted that a joint budget for seven years must be unanimously agreed on. “As long as Hungarians do not give the go-ahead, there’ll be no budget,” he said.
Migrants, he added, should not be given “a single cent” and the relevant support should be provided by member states from their own budget.
Neither Hungary not central Europe have anything to fear from any dispute over the rule of law or the budget, he said, adding that Hungary could be “particularly calm” because it had been completely assessed in 2013 from the point of view of the rule of law, “and we have it on paper that all is well”.
EP election
Referring to the impending European Parliament (EP) election and his related talks with the European People’s Party, Orbán said the main topic of the election “can be nothing other than migration”, and only the Hungarians had so far had the opportunity to express their views on the matter.
The EP election will therefore be a “big referendum” on migration,
he said, adding that he had offered his personal contribuition as well as that of the ruling Fidesz party to a major people’s party campaign. Orbán declared that the EPP was not the largest party in the European Parliament. “That label belongs to Soros.”
Photo: MTI/EPA/Christophe Petit Tesson
Why the Authoritarian Right Is Rising.
A fortnight ago, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country’s constitution. To progressives across the West, this was disturbing news. Can someone explain what ‘progressive’ means exactly in a political context? If you are Left, are you automatically progressive? If you are Ultra-Links then even more progressive? Can you also be progressive as a legal politician? And what added value does this have? For the bete noire of Orbán’s campaign was uber-globalist George Soros. And Orbán’s commitments were to any further surrenders or Hungarian sovereignty and independence to the European Union, and to any immigrant invasion of Hungary from Africa or the Islamic world. Why are autocrats like Orbán rising and liberal democrats failing in Europe? The autocrats are addressing the primary and existential fear of people across the West. – the death of the separate and unique tribes into which they were born and to which they belong. Modern liberals and progressives see nations as transitory – here today, gone tomorrow. The autocrats, however, have plugged into the most powerful currents running in this new century: tribalism and nationalism. The democracy worshipers of the West can not compete with the authoritarians in the crisis of our time because they are not what is happening to the West as a crisis. They see us as on a steady march into a brave new world, where democracy, diversity and equality will be everywhere celebrated.
To understand the rise of Orbán, we need to start seeing Europe and ourselves as so many of these people see us. Hungary is a thousand years old. Its people have a DNA all their own. They belong to a unique and storied nation of 10 million people with its own language, religion, history, heroes, culture and identity. Though a small nation, two-thirds of whose lands were torn away after World War I, Hungarians wish to remain and endure as who they are. They don’t want open borders. They don’t want mass migrations to change Hungary into something new. They don’t want to become a minority in their own country. And they have used democratic means to elect autocratic men who will put the Hungarian nation first.
U.S. elites may babble on about ’diversity’, about how much better a country we will be in 2042 when white European Christians are just another minority and we have become a ‘gorgeous mosaic’ of every race, tribe, creed and culture on earth. To Hungarians, such a future entails the death of the nation. To Hungarians, millions of African, Arab and Islamic peoples settling in their lands means the annihilation of the historic nation they love, the nation that came into being to preserve the Hungarian people.
President Emmanuel Macron of France says the Hungarian and other European elections where autocrats are advancing are manifestations of ‘national selfishness’. Well, yes, national survival can be considered national selfishness. But let Monsieur Macron bring in another 5 million former subject peoples of the French Empire and he will discover that the magnanimity and altruism of the French has its limits, and a Le Pen will soon replace him in the Elysee Palace. Consider what else the ‘world’s oldest democracy’ has lately had on offer to the indigenous peoples of Europe resisting an invasion of Third World settlers coming to occupy and repopulate their lands.
Our democracy boasts of a First Amendment freedom of speech and press that protects blasphemy, pornography, filthy language and the burning of the American flag. We stand for a guaranteed right of women to abort their children and of homosexuals to marry. We offer the world a freedom of religion that prohibits the teaching of our cradle faith and its moral code in our public schools. Our elites view this as social progress upward from a dark past. To much of the world, however, America has become the most secularized and decadent society on earth, and the title the ayatollah bestowed upon us, ‘The Great Satan’, is not altogether undeserved. And if what ‘our democracy’ has delivered here has caused tens of millions of Americans to be repulsed and to secede into social isolation, why would other nations embrace a system that produced so poisoned a politics and so polluted a culture? ‘Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the march’, writes The Washington Post: ‘Democracy as an ideal and in practice seems under siege’. Yes, and there are reasons for this. ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people’, said John Adams. And as we have ceased to be a moral and religious people, the poet T. S. Eliot warned us what would happen:
The term ‘democracy’ … does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike – it can be easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin. Recall: Hitler rose to power through a democratic election. Democracy lacks content. As a political system, it does not engage the heart. And if Europe’s peoples see their leaders as accommodating a transnational EU, while failing to secure national borders, they will use democracy to replace them with men of action.