Speaking in his normal interview slot, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began by urging Hungarians to get vaccinated. “The fourth wave is slowly surrounding Hungary, and there is an alarming situation in Romania. We are helping our neighbors, currently treating 50 Romanian patients in intensive care,” PM Orbán said, adding that the situation differs in the two countries because only 29 percent of Romanians have been vaccinated, while this figure stands at 59 percent in Hungary. “The vaccine works,” the prime minister said.
“People won’t be able to avoid the fourth wave, the delta variant is much more aggressive than earlier mutations,” PM Orbán said, stating that he himself will take up the third dose of the vaccine this weekend. “The third dose of the vaccine is something akin to life insurance,” he said. According to the PM, Hungary can fight the fourth wave without having to shut down the country.
“We are also trying to develop a vaccine, and this is going well; we have every reason to believe that we will have a Hungarian-developed vaccine soon,” PM Orbán said.
Prime Minister Orbán also spoke about the fact that Western European countries seem to have accepted that they cannot deal with the demographic crisis themselves, and this is why they’d use migrants to make up for their low birth rates. “This thinking hits Hungarians hard. We are still fighting, and Hungarian people want more kids [...] If we manage to remove the obstacles along the way, then the scale can be tilted back in our favor,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said.
“The countries of Western Europe are not content with being successful, they also want to hear that they are right. It is not enough for them that they can live freely, however they want; they also want other countries to adopt their decisions. They want to tell us how to live our lives,” PM Orbán said, adding that currently “the Goliaths of Western Europe are meddling against David.”
Even though everyone else is building fences these days, no European leader has acknowledged Hungary’s correct actions back in 2015, as “recognizing that one has made a mistake requires generosity,” the PM said.
On utility prices, the prime minister said that today people in Vienna have to pay double the utility costs that Hungarians pay, and Germans pay triple. According to him, fixing utility prices was one of the first battles with Brussels after 2010, and now they would increase the cost of electricity, gas and fuel by citing climate policy.
“The Hungarian standpoint is that the climate-damaging companies must bear the costs of climate policy, not citizens,” PM Orbán said in closing.