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PM Orbán: Mask wearing is key, Hungarians must abide by the regulations

“Right now, obligatory mask wearing is key,” PM Orbán said on Kossuth Rádió this morning, adding that it is not the number of new restrictions that matter, but how many people obey the existing rules.

In his regular Friday morning interview on Kossuth Rádió’s Good Morning Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began by stressing the importance of mask wearing in public spaces.

While the government decided on Thursday that obligatory mask wearing will be enforced in restaurants and clubs from Monday, PM Orbán said that “if we experience people disobeying the regulations, then we must use force to make them abide by them.”

“The situation will get tougher and tougher, what we had shown previously will not be enough, we will need more,” the prime minister said, adding that – contrary to the claims of Hungarian opposition parties – Hungary has the third largest healthcare reserves in Europe, closely behind Austria and Germany. “In terms of ventilators, we are the leaders in Europe,” PM Orbán said.

Shedding some light on the possible arrival date of the first coronavirus vaccine shipment to Hungary, the prime minister said that, according to his calculations, it should arrive by late December to early January. “Those in the highest-risk groups will need to hang in there for another 2-3 months,” the PM revealed. “A large shipment of vaccines can then be expected in the following months, so we could wave goodbye to the virus by April.”

In response to yesterday’s terror attack in Nice, Prime Minister Orbán said that we, Hungarians, have 150 years of experience in living together with Muslim culture. “We know and respect the Muslim world, but only where it belongs,” the PM said, adding that “the future of Africans, for example, must be in Africa; just as the future of Hungarians must be in Europe.”

“If you don’t want to adapt, the only thing you can do is to keep them out,” Prime Minister Orbán said.

According to the PM, our situation is “not easy,” as we are “being pushed” not only by Brussels, but also the Hungarian opposition parties, who clearly have a pro-migration agenda. “But we must persevere,” PM Orbán said, and wondered “how could they be so blind as to throw away the continent.”

Further elaborating on the migration situation in Western Europe, Prime Minister Orbán reminded that “a certain Italian interior minister called Matteo Salvini” put an end to migration from the Mediterranean Sea in Italy. “It is in our best interest that anti-migration politicians rise to power in Western Europe,” the PM said.

“We could talk about whether European freedom of speech is correctly established, but there is no excuse for someone to murder innocent people,” the PM concluded.