Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has stated that whereas Hungarians have a mission to protect the Carpathian Basin, the West has lost sight of its own mission.
During a speech given recently at Budapest’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium, the prime minister noted that Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford University, had criticized the Hungarian government for ideas he called dangerous for the EU. PM Orbán insisted there were indeed cultural, spiritual and political differences mounting between central Europe and western Europeans. PM Orbán said the West had bestrode the globe for 400 years with a sense of exceptionalism and a mission which gave it inspiration and self-confidence. But at the start of the 21st century Western civilisation had started to confront serious challenges.
The prime minister said a “woke” neo-Marxism was taking hold in America, while Europe was beset by a Muslim demographic, political and economic tide, creating a new state of affairs in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Austria. The West, said PM Orbán, was not up to the task of providing adequate political solutions to such problems. In the English-language post, PM Orbán wrote: “In my view, there is a Central European cultural, intellectual and political entity that is growing more and more different from Western Europe; but this is not hazardous, it is not a threat. It is, in fact, a blessing for the European Union and even Western Europe.”