Marking the centenary of the post-WW1 Trianon Peace Treaty in Parliament yesterday, President János Áder said the Hungarian nation "belongs not only to the past but to the future, too".
“Many think that Hungary belongs to the past, but I would like to believe that it belongs to the future,” the president said, quoting 19th century Hungarian politician István Széchenyi.
“After a hundred years, traumatized by two world wars and Trianon, and by economic crises; with over 40 years of a communist detour and a failed revolution behind us … here we are, we are alive,” the president said in his address.
Hungary’s geographical borders were changed in 1920 but “nobody can deprive us of the right to maintain the nation’s spiritual boundaries,” he said.
President Áder said a hundred years ago, a humiliated Hungary was mourning the loss of two-thirds of its territory and the shrinking of its population from 18 million to 7.5 million. Over 3 million Hungarians found themselves living beyond the new border. It is now the fourth generation asking the questions whether the world war could have been avoided or why “the Trianon decision turned out to be so immeasurably unjust for Hungary,” he said.