Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said changes in the world order are underway and Asia will be at its center, so a “Hungarian grand strategy” is both needed and in the pipeline.
In his address at the Bálványos Summer University in Băile Tuşnad, Romania, PM Orbán said European politics “has collapsed”, arguing that Europe had relinquished the protection of its own interests. “Europe is currently following the politics of the US Democratic Party unconditionally, even at the cost of self-destruction,” he said, adding that sanctions imposed on Russia were hurting European interests, raising energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive. Orbán said the European system of powers had so far been based on a “Paris-Berlin axis”, but this no longer existed, or had at least “become irrelevant and evadable” compared with the “new power centre” comprising London, Warsaw, Kyiv and the Baltic and Scandinavian states. He said the idea of replacing the Paris-Berlin axis was not a new one but rather “an old Polish plan” that involved Poland becoming the continent’s main American base. This, he added, required “calling the Americans in there, between the Germans and the Russians”. But this, he added, could only be made a reality owing to the current war. “This is an old plan: weaken Russia and surpass Germany,” Orbán said, insisting that Poland was pursuing the “most deceitful politics” in Europe, arguing that “they’re obliviously doing business with the Russians while morally lecturing us for doing the same thing”. He said Poland had abandoned the Visegrad cooperation in order to pursue this strategy as the V4, besides accepting the Paris-Berlin axis, acknowledged that “Germany is strong, Russia is strong, and between the two, in cooperation with the central European states, we form a third component”.
The prime minister said Hungary’s “peace mission”, besides aiming for peace, was also about urging Europe to “finally pursue a policy of its own”. Orbán said the West had drifted into “intellectual loneliness”, arguing that until now it had seen itself as a point of reference, or a global standard because it had been the one to contribute values such as liberal democracy and the green transition, which the world had to accept. “But this situation has taken a 180-degree turn over the last two years” Orbán said, arguing that although the West had once again told the world to take a more determined stance against Russia, the reality was that “slowly everyone is supporting Russia”. He said it was unsurprising that countries like North Korea and China were backing Russia, but Iran, India and even NATO member Türkiye had joined them, and the Muslim world also saw Russia as a partner.
Orbán said the biggest problem in the world was “the weakness and disintegration of the West”, as well as the Western media narrative that Russia was the biggest danger to the world. “This is a mistake,” he said, arguing that Russia’s leadership was “hyper-rational, comprehendible and predictable”, unlike the West’s “irrational and unpredictable” actions. He said Hungary’s task was to try to understand the West again. Central Europe’s worldview lay in the idea of nation-states, while the West “believes that they no longer exist”, he added. Also, the West, he said, thought differently about issues such as migration. While hundreds of thousands of Christians were killing each other in Europe’s east, hundreds of thousands of people from “foreign civilisations” were being allowed into the western parts of the continent. He said the EU “not only thinks this way, but also declares it”, and their objective was to “transcend nations” and transpose their sovereignty to Brussels.
A similar battle was taking place in the United States, he said, so the stakes in the US presidential election “are enormous”. Orbán said Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, wanted to bring the American people back from the “post-national liberal condition” to the “national condition”. Opposition to this endeavour was behind moves to thwart Trump’s candidacy, he said. “This is why they want to put him in prison, why they’re stripping him of his wealth, and if that doesn’t work, this is why they wanted to kill him,” Orbán said, adding that the “dramatic, democracy-shaking” political consequence of the post-national condition was the political problem of elitism and populism. He said the elites “condemn the people for drifting towards the right” and labelled the people’s feelings and thoughts “xenophobic, homophobic and nationalistic”. Meanwhile, “the people”, he said, suspected the elite of “sinking into some mindless globalism” instead of caring about what mattered to them. He said this raised the problem of representative democracy: the elite, “even quite proudly”, did not want to represent the people, leaving the people effectively disenfranchised. Orbán said the elites “only find the values held by degree-holders acceptable”. This, he added, resulted in Brussels remaining “occupied by a liberal oligarchy”. “This left-liberal elite is actually organising the Transatlantic elite, which isn’t European but global, isn’t made up of nation-states but is federal, and isn’t democratic but political,” the prime minister said.