Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told public radio in an interview on Friday that a European “security solution involving Russia” is needed, adding that all sides should be made to feel safe, “as this may guarantee that a [further] armed conflict does not break out”.
The prime minister recalled that Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, had suggested that the idea of war broadening to Europe was “no longer a fantasy”, and he also cited the Polish foreign minister as saying that the war in Ukraine could not have a diplomatic solution and could only be resolved through “raw military power”. PM Orbán said those remarks “conceal a real will” and they were not just soundbites. He also recalled Hungary’s NATO accession in 1999, when the country had to “go through frontline baptism overnight” when NATO “decided to attack Serbia, and Hungary had to contribute military facilities, mainly airfields.” Orbán also said the US “also had aspirations to open another front in northern Serbia, at the Hungarian border, and they had actual military plans for Hungary to implement… I rejected those and managed to keep Hungary out of the war.” Though the Balkan wars were “smaller in scale” than the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a huge number of refugees arrived and were accommodated in southern Hungary, he said. “While the country was not at war, the war made it suffer greatly,” he said.
PM Orbán said the war not only led to losses but produced winners, too, insisting that Washington’s aid to Ukraine “is in fact a massive military order for American industry”. War profiteers, he added, were “few but … strong”. He said tension resulted, as “most people are on the side of peace”. Orbán said central Europe had “lost all wars” while Western Europe had won them, emerging victorious though at the cost of great suffering. “Our historical experience with war is that you can only lose out,” he said. “The closer you are to a war zone, the higher the price you pay.” Staying out of the war “requires courage and national unity … the leader of a politically divided country will have great difficulties in keeping his country out of the war,” he insisted. The prime minister estimated that some 80-90% of Hungarian voters were on the side of peace, adding that “I must represent the desire for life rooted in the country’s deepest life instincts”. He said “even the pro-war left knows that war is worse than peace”, and he suggested that “the left is being paid” to promote their position. “In the whole of Europe — and for the time being in America too — governments are for war, and that is why they want a new government in Hungary … a pro-war government,” Orbán said.
The prime minister added that Europe may be "drifting into war", declaring that the outcome of the upcoming EP elections would hinge on "the number of votes for pro-war forces as opposed to the number for the pro-peace camp". “In Hungary, those who support peace will vote for Fidesz; those who vote for the left-wing will cast their ballot for war,” Viktor Orbán said in an interview to public radio. “Europe is playing with fire at the border of peace and war,” Orbán said. Noting the war in Ukraine has lasted two years, Orbán said European leaders had been implementing sanctions, strategising and “drifting day by day, not from war to peace, but from peace to war”. “This is highly dangerous and I’m worried about Europe’s future,” he said. Recalling the war in the Balkans, he said that he had personal experiences of “the wind of war whistling past your ears”, and it was not fitting to agree with statements about the war “spoken as if it were an afternoon tea party”. Hungary, he added, was forced into a war twice, tragically sealing its fate. “We did not want to take part in either the first or second world war; we were forced into both and were among those who paid the highest price for this in the end,” he said, adding that the government would not allow Hungary to be forced into a war for a third time.