Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at an award ceremony in Brussels that "it’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a good chance for forces with a national conservative, sovereigntist and Christian basis to become dominant in the European Union".
“It is nations rather than the Soros empire or Brussels bureaucrats that will win the debate with liberals,” the prime minister said. The ideology of an open society will not gain ground in central Europe, PM Orbán insisted. “We will relegate them where they belong, the garbage heap of history, just as we have expelled the communists.” At the ceremony, the Hunyadi János Award of the For a Civic Hungary Foundation was given to Polish MEP Ryszard Antoni Legutko. Referring to the Polish awardee, PM Orbán said Legutko had “studied the operations of the European Union and discovered critical signs of endeavours for political authoritarianism”. “He established that progressive liberals have an adversarial attitude towards anybody else with a different way of thinking … they have become like the communists and pose a real danger to freedom, pursuing their own utopian nightmares,” PM Orbán said. “Progressive liberals in the European Union are not interested in the European person … they only have an interest in their own ideology,” PM Orbán said. “If promoting those ideas costs dismantling European industry and agriculture, they will do so… If it involves erasing Europe’s culture through illegal migration, they will also do that,” PM Orbán said. “But we do not promote ideas but represent European people,” he added. PM Orbán said that at the time of Hungary’s accession to the European Union in 2004, “we felt that we had arrived and that we were home.” “We thought that the EU was a guarantee of prosperity and our national independence,” he said. But he said Legutko had recognised earlier that the representatives of liberalism strove to “eliminate sovereignty, take away as much of member states’ national competencies as possible”, and to control the bloc with “political diktats”. “Those we are arguing with actually want to eliminate us,” he said. After Brexit, the representation of sovereignty had been left to central Europe, the prime minister said, adding that the Poles and the Hungarians had always been in agreement when it came to the matter of sovereignty. “For the first time in decades, I feel that the sovereigntist central Europeans are not alone,” PM Orbán said. He said something was “astir” among German farmers, as well as in France and Portugal, while the “international conservative sovereigntist forces” had also become key players on the Netherlands’ political scene. “Europe is showing signs of life; it’s defending and having its voice heard,” the prime minister said. PM Orbán said that after Legutko had discovered the “motifs of communism” in progressive liberalism, he “spoke about it openly”. The prime minister praised Legutko for his courage to speak about the “autocratic tendencies that were inherent in liberalism” in the 1990s, thanking him for contributing to Hungarian freedom through his work.