Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Europe "is in trouble" as it has still not managed to define its new place in the global economy.
During an international foreign policy forum at Lake Bled, in Slovenia, PM Orbán said Europe has a hard time understanding that, unlike the United States and China, it is incapable of “fundamentally changing the rules of the game”.
PM Orbán told the 15th annual Bled Strategic Forum that one reason for this is that Europe still does not have a joint military supported by science and innovation hubs that could serve as “the engines of technological advancement”.
Answering a question, the prime minister said Hungary’s political scene was characterised by a “battle for intellectual sovereignty”, adding that his government was fighting to enforce its Christian Democratic and conservative approach to democracy as against liberalist views.
“We’re fighting so that European institutions and politics can be looked at from more than one point of view and so that we can engage in debates on ideas such as family, nation, cultural traditions, religion and migration,” PM Orbán said. Hungarian democracy “is at least as good as German or Italian democracy”, and it complies with European norms, the prime minister added.
PM Orbán said that solidarity led to shared success, but European countries could not be successful together if they were not successful on their own. The economic and political success of individual European nations is not the antithesis of shared European success but rather one of its preconditions and building blocks, he insisted.
The prime minister said the key elements to the European Union’s future success would be its capacity to form a joint military, the accession of Serbia to the bloc and the creation of a competitive economy spearheaded by central Europe.
The forum in Bled, in north-western Slovenia, is a major foreign policy event bringing together the heads of state and government and foreign ministers of several countries. The main topics on this year’s agenda are the challenges and opportunities faced by Europe in light of the novel coronavirus pandemic and Brexit.
Photo credit: Facebook/Orbán Viktor