Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that if Ukraine is admitted to the European Union, war will also be admitted.
Speaking at the closing conference of parliamentary events in connection with Hungary's EU presidency, in Budapest on Monday, PM Orbán said: "Hungarians respect and try to understand positions different from their own." He said several EU members were for continued support to Ukraine so that the country can go on fighting. "We are of a different opinion, we think the longer the war goes on, the more people will die and the worse the situation on the battlefield," he said.
Concerning the European Commission's proposal to make it mandatory for member states to give up Russian energy supplies, PM Orbán said, "it would simply kill the Hungarian economy". "Just imagine the price of energy suddenly doubling for households and companies … Hungarian families could not cope with that," he said.
"Hungarians want peace and would get rid of the policy of economic sanctions as soon as possible," PM Orbán said.
Meanwhile, PM Orbán said the EU had never admitted a country at war "with good reason". In addition, he said, "member states could not bear the economic burden Ukraine's membership would pose".
He also said that the earlier accession of central and eastern European countries had benefitted the community. "But the situtation with Ukraine is different … it would be a bad deal resulting in an agricultural crisis, unemployment, indebtedness and deteriorating conditions of life," he said.
PM Orbán compared the changes in global politics to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, "the birth of modern nation states". "The world is in reshuffle, the ideology of the Western world is changing, and we Europeans need to react to that," Orban said, and asked participants to focus on issues around national sovereignty and Ukraine's aspirations for EU membership, adding that those subjects would "define the future of EU member states and the role of their parliaments in the next decades."
He said progressive liberalism had failed in the United States and was replaced by patriotism, which has serious international consequences. He said what had happened in the US was "no electoral accident … but the start of a new era"; the US was interested in promoting a liberal international order in the past 80 years but "now it has started dismantling that system as it is not seen as serving its own interests."
Meanwhile, he said, "China is forging ahead and has become a competitor not only in terms of industrial capacity but also concerning the level of its technology." He added that "India is about to make a debut in world politics" and suggested that India could become "a global power centre comparable to China".
Yet, Europe is unprepared, PM Orbán said. "It's as if we wanted to resolve the problems of the next decade with responses from the previous decade, but old truths do not work anymore, the world has changed, and we Europeans have failed to follow suit," he said. Orban said that he had witnessed "the years the EU has wasted", adding that "if we had governed Hungary as the European Commission managed Europe we would long be bankrupt."
PM Orbán said the western strategy to break Russia had failed. "Nobody dares to admit it but we have lost this war," he said, and added that Russia's economy had not collapsed, sanctions had not worked, and the Russians had managed to thwart Ukraine's NATO membership.
He said the US had realised that and they were now involved in negotiations whereas "we Europeans" still go on with the war and act as if victory were still possible. "I hope I will not be right, but eventually we will be left alone with a war next door, with all our money spent on an unachievable victory," he said.
The EU has given up a successful economic strategy based on cheap Russian energy and modern German technologies, but "it has failed to come up with a new one … we are in the middle of nowhere", Orban said. He insisted that US and Chinese companies buy energy at one third or fourth of the price European companies pay because "in the wake of the sanctions cheap energy has disappeared from Europe … the sanctions and the Green Deal together will destroy the European economy."
Europe's economy "is on a backtrack rather than in competition", PM Orbán said, adding that out of the world's 50 largest tech companies only four were European. The gap between the GDPs of Europe and the US has doubled in the past 20 years to the benefit of the US, while real wages in the US have grown twice as fast as in Europe since the year 2000, he added.
PM Orbán called for a new strategy and strong European leaders, and said "Europe now is rich and weak, the most dangerous combination, therefore the community needs to be reinforced."
Europe grew strong through the emergence of nation states, and the EU became successful through cooperation between nation states, "through the strong leaders of strong national democracies," PM Orbán said.
The EU "owes everything to national parliaments" he said, and added that "nation states cannot be strong and successful without strong parliaments."
PM Orbán said national parliaments were the historic representatives and laboratories for European constitutionality and the development of democracy. The common European values so often cited in Brussels are actually born in the halls and corridors of national parliaments, he added.
If the EU wants to be successful, it must pay more respect to national parliaments "which are not artificial institutions created by agreements but real bodies of popular representation, evolving through an organic development, and this should not be forgotten even in Brussels", PM Orbán said.
He said this was why it is "unpleasant and haughty when bureaucrats not elected by anyone want to lecture the leaders of national institutions and elected representatives about democracy and values".
PM Orbán said he had witnessed for 15 years that whenever Europe faced problems, the response from Brussels was the same: more powers to Brussels and less room for manoeuvre to nation states. And the result was always the same: the troubles did not shrink but grew larger, he added.
He said Brussels "threatens cutting community funding for those that protect the framework of nation states; if that does not work, it will thwart national governments, topple them and help to power agent parties ready to give up national sovereignty", adding that "they are making an attempt in Hungary for the third time".
PM Orbán said the situation had reached a level where "they openly admit that in Hungary's case they want the economy to deteriorate, so that the national government can be replaced by a puppet government serving Brussels' interests".
"This was not the intent of the founding fathers of the EU, it will never become strong this way, but weak," he added.
He also said that "the NGO scandal of Brussels" was growing, with Brussels bureaucrats forwarding many hundred millions of euros public monies to organisations that promoted and lobbied for a federal Europe. "This cannot be described any other way but as an attempted coup against national parliaments," he added.
PM Orbán said the question was what national parliaments could do against the "supra-nationalist steamroller of Brussels". He highlighted a resolution about the future of the EU approved by Hungary's parliament which proposed, among others, removing from the treaties the principle of increasingly tight unity, including in the treaties a mention of Europe's Christian roots and culture, the political and ideological neutrality of the European Commission, and strengthening the principle of subsidiarity.
"If we indeed want to build a strong Europe, then national parliaments deserve a leading role and not a supporting role. We, the representatives of national parliaments, have an obligation to play our role, and we Hungarians are ready to do so. Make Europe Great Again," PM Orbán said.