In an exclusive interview that aired last night in the United States on Fox News, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sat down with Tucker Carlson, America’s most popular primetime host, to discuss a couple of pressing issues.
Starting with the topic of migration, Prime Minister Orbán argued that stopping migrants who had no permission whatsoever to enter Hungary’s territory in 2015 was “the only reasonable behavior.” “You can't say simply that, OK, it's a nice country, I would like to come here and to live here because it's a nicer life. It is not a human right to come here. No way, because it's our land. It's a nation, it's a community [with] families, historic tradition, language,” PM Orbán said.
According to the PM, many European countries decided to open a new chapter in their history. They call it a “new society,” which is a post-Christian, post-national construct. They firmly believe that it’s a good thing if different communities, Muslims and Christians, are mixed.
“The outcome of this will not be good. There is no answer that it will be good or bad, but I think it's very risky, and the chance that it will be not good, but it will be very bad, is obvious. And each nation has the right to take this risk or to reject this risk. We Hungarians decided not to take that risk to mix up our society. That's the reason why they attack Hungary, so hard,” PM Orbán said.
Tucker Carlson recalled when President Joe Biden called the Hungarian PM a “totalitarian thug” in the election campaign last year. Responding to the notorious remark, PM Orbán noted that many Hungarians reacted by asking “Who is that guy to say that?” “OK, he's the president of the United States, so we should take it seriously. But anyway, he is somebody who does not speak our language and has very limited knowledge of Hungary,” PM Orbán said, adding that Biden’s remark was a “personal insult for all the Hungarians.”
According to Prime Minister Orbán, the reason why Biden singled Hungary and Poland out is because of their success. “Western liberals cannot accept that inside the Western civilization, there's a conservative, national alternative, which is more successful at everyday life than the liberal ones,” the PM said, calling Hungary an example of the fact that a country based on traditional values, national identity and Christianity could be successful, or sometimes even more successful than a leftist liberal government.
Analyzing the current trends and looking into the future, Prime Minister Orbán noted that many Christian, conservative families who began to think that Western Europe is no longer safe enough are relocating to Hungary. “The future [in Western Europe] is unstable,” the prime minister said, adding that “We can't exclude a future of European history when there will be a new migration from West to East within Europe.”