Americans electing Donald Trump for president have voted against this “liberal” ideologically driven “fake world,” the prime minister said. “We have crossed the threshold of a new era.” The prime minister said he plans to once again counter this kind of ideologically-driven thinking in Brussels in December at the European Council meeting, where migration will be on the agenda.
This week brought significant developments on several fronts. On Tuesday, opposition parties in the Hungarian parliament decided to vote down a change to the constitution, dismissing the will of 3.3 million voters that would have prohibited Brussels from relocating migrants onto Hungary’s territory without the parliament’s consent. In the early morning hours of Wednesday, U.S. election results showed that Donald Trump will become the 45th president. Later on that day, Prime Minister Orbán met UK Prime Minister Theresa May to discuss bilateral relations after Brexit, particularly the rights of workers in the two countries. All of these issues, in one way or another, signaled disagreements between ideology and reality.
On the vote in parliament, “the opposition has joined sides with Brussels” and it turned out that in the government’s fight against illegal migration “one cannot count on the opposition,” he said. Nevertheless, the government will keep up the struggle and the front has shifted to the European level. “What we could achieve at home, we did,” the prime minister explained, citing the national consultation, the referendum and the attempt to build a constitutional protection against compulsory resettlement of migrants. Now, the fight has to be carried out in Brussels at the meeting of European leaders, December 16-17.
At his meeting with UK Prime Minister Theresa May, PM Orbán commented that regardless of whether or not the United Kingdom is in the EU, the British alliance system has been and will be a defining one for Europe. Prime Minister Orbán was confident that they have reached an agreement, according to which “it will not be worse for British companies in Hungary” and, in return “it will not be worse for Hungarians already working in the United Kingdom.”
Prime Minister Orbán, the first active head of government to endorse some of President-elect Donald Trump’s policies over the summer, has expressed high hopes following announcement of the US election results. Bilateral relations would improve with the US, because with the current administration led by Democrats, cooperation has been constrained, he said. Military cooperation has been “excellent.” Business cooperation has been “improving,” but political cooperation has been poor, as the U.S. side has “lived in a liberal-constructed world, which [they] wanted to force on the rest of the world.”
The prime minister also said that Hungary would like to see less heated, less “bellicose” relations between the U.S. and Russia and it will not come overnight, but “there is a good chance” the world will be a better place with the new president.