Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a pleasure to see you again. First of all, I wish you all a Blessed, Peaceful and Happy Christmas and a Prosperous and Healthy New Year.
At our press conference today, in addition to being at your disposal if you have any topical questions, I would first like to talk about three things. I would like to give a brief assessment of the Hungarian Presidency of the European Union as it comes to an end. Then I would like to say a few words about the situation I think European and Hungarian politics is in after the US presidential elections. And finally I would like to say a few words about the decisions we have already taken that will determine our plans for 2025.
Before everything else, it is perhaps right that we first convey our feelings of sympathy and sorrow to the families of the victims of the terrorist attack in Germany, and to the German people in general. We are with them after this terrorist attack – something which unfortunately happens now on a regular basis, almost every Christmas. It is perhaps appropriate to wait a day or two before drawing political conclusions, as at this time of year the prevailing feeling is still one of sympathy. This is only right. However, I would like to say that these phenomena have only existed in Europe since the migration crisis. There is no doubt, therefore, that there is a link between the changed world of Western Europe, the influx of migration, especially illegal migration, and acts of terrorism. Although I can see that there are still those who try to deny these links, the simple fact of saying that there was no such thing before and that there is such a thing now is something that demands to be taken seriously. And therefore the lesson that Hungary can draw from this is that it must continue to insist that Hungary must not be allowed to transform itself into a world in which something like this can happen. But above all, we are with the Germans.
As for the Hungarian Presidency, this week’s meeting of the European Council also assessed the Hungarian Presidency – expressing unanimous praise. So we have had a successful Presidency. The numbers showing the amount of work done are available to all of us through social media. We had more than one thousand consultation meetings, a huge number of consultations, and we adopted a lot of documents; so the amount of work and energy invested was very considerable. Having overseen a Hungarian Presidency once before, I can say that this time we have had to invest a lot more energy than we did ten or so years ago. This is understandable, because in the meantime the large body of European legislation known as the acquis communautaire has also fattened up, it has swollen; and if you want to move things forward, you have to simultaneously manage and develop many more dossiers than you needed to earlier. The number of Hungarian legislative dossiers was around one hundred. Talking about success, perhaps we can spare you the sarcastic sniping, but I would like to say that the isolation we have suffered in the past six months is like none I have ever seen in my life: half the world was here in Hungary, we held the biggest diplomatic event in Hungary’s history, and at the end of our work even our opponents have congratulated us on the quantity and quality of the work we have done.
In terms of quality, there are two possible presidencies: either political or bureaucratic. Each has its own beauty, and there are times when it is better to choose one rather than the other. But when there are unresolved political issues on the European table, it is right to choose the political approach. This is because political problems cannot be solved with bureaucratic answers, but only with political instruments and answers. And there were several such political problems on the table.
The first was the war. On the issue of the war, our Presidency had no room for manoeuvre, given that in the European Union there is serious and deep disagreement about what Europe’s strategy should be in the war between Russia and Ukraine. One side – they are in the overwhelming majority, and their will prevails at the moment – is of the opinion that this war is Europe’s war. It is, as they say, “Our war”. Fortunately we are not included in this “we”. It is a war, they say, in which Europe is directly involved and therefore has to take part in. It is only a question of who should take part, what to send, what not to send, when to send it, and how much to send. The other position is ours: this is not our war, but a fratricidal war between two Slavic peoples; and we must strive to isolate it, not to jump into it and magnify, reinforce and extend it through our participation. This is our policy. This difference of opinion has been there in European public life since the outbreak of the war. According to the European Union’s founding treaties, action on this can only be taken if there is a common will, and so within the framework of the EU Presidency our hands were essentially tied. Nevertheless, I believed that the gravity of the situation justified Hungary’s peace mission and peace initiatives. We kept these separate from the EU Presidency. There was some controversy about this, but no one now disputes that Hungary had the right – and in our view the duty – to launch peace missions.
The other open political question on Europe’s table was the Schengen Area, the importance of which we Hungarians no longer understand, because we have forgotten it. This is as it should be: let us be glad that we have forgotten it. We no longer have the feeling that we are part of a community, that there are twenty-seven members of the European Union, but that some are more rightful members than us, some have more rights than us. We felt this in the past. But there was little of the European spirit in the fact that the Romanians and Bulgarians felt that they were not equal, full members of the European Union community with the other states, but that on one of the most important issues – where you can go, how you can go, how you can move – there was a special rule for them and they were not part of the Schengen Area. The abolition of this, apart from being good for the Romanians, good for the Bulgarians and, of course, very good for Hungary, also offers the solution to a European problem. This enlargement has been blocked for the past ten or thirteen years – maybe thirteen years. It was always possible to know which country was blocking and when, why and how; and this blockade – or this block, perhaps this is more accurate – had to be lifted through a great deal of negotiation and agreement. And finally we were able to reach an agreement with all the countries that had previously blocked the enlargement of the Schengen Area, they changed their previous attitude and the path opened up for Romania and Bulgaria to enter the Schengen Area. I believe that this will also have consequences for Hungarians – beneficial consequences, which we are not even thinking about at the moment; but if you compare life on Hungary’s western border today with life there, say, ten or so years ago, or twenty or so years ago, the difference is clear. So today life in Sopron and its region, and down there in Zala County in general, along the border, presents a completely different picture than it did before. This is because life wants to live, it wants to restore its own order, it comes and goes, it works. The deep fabric of life also changes: if there is a border on one side that you cannot cross, the structure of life is completely different from how it is if you can move freely, do business, and keep in touch with your family. Now, for Hungary, the disappearance or closure of the Romanian border – which we have now dismantled jointly with the Romanians – means that we used to have twelve road border crossing points, and now, from 1 January, we will have twenty-two. When families, colleagues or relatives wanted to cross the border, it used to mean a 37-kilometre detour; now this will be reduced by almost half, to around 19–20 kilometres. This shows that this opens up a new perspective and new opportunity for Hungary. I am sure that the quality of the border region, which has suffered from isolation and difficult movement, will change significantly and will improve. And the fact that after six months we will be able to withdraw all our border guards and police officers from that section of the border – indeed to start their continuous withdrawal even in January – will be of enormous help to Hungary in protecting public order, which is an area that is currently understaffed.
The third political issue that was on the table in connection with the European Presidency was the deterioration in European competitiveness. You have written a lot about this. I do not think that I can provide you with any new context, but I will simply state the fact that the share of total world production produced by the Member States of the European Union is constantly declining, and our share of world trade is also declining. This is true for the whole of Europe! The Draghi Report, the contents of which are much more militant and radical than what we usually say, is a report that describes the gravity of the situation in straightforward terms. Therefore during the Presidency it was our task to bring this Draghi Report to the table. We had the former Prime Minister of Italy and the former President of the European Central Bank here in Budapest at the summit, we presented the study, we listened to him and we drew conclusions. This is called the competitiveness pact. This is the conclusion. It is the Budapest Declaration, in which we describe what we must do in the next six months – with deadlines and responsibilities – in order to stop the decline in European competitiveness and to reverse course. No such document was produced before. Generally there was a left-wing agenda for the European Union. When we talked about grand pacts, they were usually about social issues, which are important, and climate issues, which are also important. Generally we were able to reach a common standpoint in areas other than competitiveness, competition and struggle, the market, capital accumulation and investment. I think it is a major achievement that we have managed to talk about the market, capital, investment, efficiency and to build consensus in a Europe, which I think fundamentally leans to the Left.
Equally important, I think, is the political question of what European agriculture will look like after 2027. So far you know very little about this, you see very little of it, but deep underground negotiations on the budget for the seven-year cycle that will begin after 2027 are already underway. So the debate has already begun on how much money – a huge amount of the European budget -should go into agriculture and farming, and how it should be allocated. And it will only be possible to reach agreement on this if the twenty-seven Member States think similarly about the future of Europe’s agricultural economy. We can agree on the financial consequences if we agree on what we want to give money for and why. In the depths there are fierce debates about this, and even if they do not always ripple the surface of the water, they can be seen and heard from time to time. I think it is a great achievement that the twenty-seven agriculture ministers have agreed on the future of Europe’s agricultural economy after 2027. This does not mean that the financial discussions are over; they are just beginning, but at least we know what we are discussing and why, and what we want to achieve by spending the money. So there is a common European position on the future of agricultural policy.
I think that time has justified our decision to not simply digest, chew over and push forward the legal dossiers on the most important issues with a kind of bureaucratic approach, but instead to achieve results by taking a bold, original, political approach, which rose to political challenges. So it is worth taking a risk, being brave and accepting debates even on issues that at first sight seem to be insoluble. Before the Hungarian Presidency no one would have bet that Schengen enlargement would happen, that a competitiveness pact could be put together, and that agriculture ministers would be able to develop a common vision for the future of Europe’s agriculture. If we had asked anyone on 1 July, they would have given us high odds against this happening. By comparison with that, it has all been achieved.
Having said this, I would like to say a few words about the situation in Europe after the US presidential elections, and the new situation in the Western world. Here the first question that immediately arises is this: Is there a new situation, is there a new reality? I’ve come here from Brussels, where they know that there is not. So what I experienced at the European Council meeting was that everything will continue as before. So, for the time being, the European elite – let us put it this way – is not aware of any new reality, any new situation. From a legal point of view this is perhaps understandable, because the new US president will only take office on 20 January. But we all know that if he achieves even a fraction of what he has committed to achieving, the world will face enormous changes. If, for example, we take seriously – and I suggest that we do – the personal messages that he sent to Europe yesterday and the day before yesterday, that if we do not voluntarily improve the ratio of US–European trade that is advantageous for Europe and disadvantageous for America, then we will have tariffs “the old way”, as a dynamic American president puts it. Or, to put it another way: the floodgates on tariffs will be thrown open. This is just one aspect that I can mention now. Europe needs to realise that we will soon be living in a new reality. The balance of power within the Western world has changed completely, new things will happen, things that we have never dreamed of before – or at most that we Hungarians have dreamed of. The attitude of the Western world to migration, to family protection and to traditional values – what we call the gender problem – will be completely different; the attitude to economic relations will be completely different; and the attitude to the war and the resulting sanctions will be completely different. We are facing a very big change. We are moving, we would say, from a time of war to a time of peace. Hungary is happy about this. This is what we have always wanted. We believe that in times of war Hungary can never win. There are various geographical, political, economic and military obstacles to this. Hungary can win in peace. It can win in peace much more easily than it can win in war, which is why it is a good thing that in the Russo–Ukrainian war we have given the Ukrainians all the humanitarian aid we could, but we have never supplied weapons, we will never supply weapons, and we will never give money for weapons.
I can inform you that the war has forced around one and a half million Ukrainian refugees to enter Hungary. Because where else would those poor people have gone if not through Transcarpathia to Hungary? Most of them have moved on, and according to the latest figures, today eighty thousand of them are in Hungary. We have helped Ukraine in energy supply, in training doctors, and in saving lives generally. We have made peace offers and proposals throughout, and there is a Hungarian proposal on the table for a Christmas ceasefire and a mass prisoner exchange. But the consequence of the war has not only been this terrible, agonising, loss of life: there are also economic consequences. War also means a wartime economy. But now our understanding is that we can bring this to an end and a new era can arrive: the war can end and peace can begin. If the war ends, then the sanctions that have been plaguing the European economy can be lifted. Hungary’s position is that sanctions should be lifted completely, as soon as possible and as widely as possible. If this succeeds, the inflationary era will also be brought to an end, an economic recovery can finally begin, and prosperity can return to the whole of Europe. This is the point of view and the change that we are advocating in the European debates today. And, as I have said, we are hitting a very solid wall; because, apart from one or two countries – apart from one or two countries in addition to us, with the big ones all on the other side – this idea has not yet reached maturity.
In fact, what happened in the European Parliament was that the parties that make up the majority in Parliament made an agreement, a pact. Perhaps it was President Weber who brought this about – because the largest party in the European Parliament is, after all, the European People’s Party. They have laid down that the task is to carry on as before. Indeed there is even more to it than that, because it has also been proposed that for five years all the Member States should be made to devote 0.25 per cent of their gross domestic product to supporting Ukraine. So this European Parliament pact, which has a large majority, makes provision for Hungary to pay in 200 billion forints every year. That is a lot of money! To understand how much, it is half of Hungary’s monthly pension budget. Meanwhile we have long since stopped talking about how much money we should put into the war, but how we should end it and how we should win the peace, how much money we should invest in peace.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am convinced that the US election result is in line with the change in European politics that we have helped to bring about, and that the formation of the Patriots for Europe group has given new impetus to the European Parliament. Thus we have a situation in which there is Brussels and there is the opposition to Brussels. This is not how European politics looked earlier. Now these three parties have concluded the agreement and the Patriots have essentially been squeezed out of all the positions that, according to parliamentary mathematics, we are entitled to: we have been completely squeezed out. We have therefore been pushed into a position of complete opposition, and so now there is an opposition to Brussels: there is a liberal Brussels elite, and there is an opposition to it. And this is also illustrated by the fact that Hungary – which does not want something like what happened in Magdeburg – is being fined 1 million euros a day for guarding its borders, because we are not allowing migrants into Hungary. This is the situation in Europe that we are in, and that we will be swimming in at the beginning of next year.
After this, briefly the outlook and plans. If the Government feels that something important is on the agenda, for example, if it feels that there is a need to change economic policy, to change from a wartime economic policy to a peacetime economic policy, then we will use various political instruments to make this change happen – to make it understandable to people, who can accept it or reject it. In this, one of the most successful tools is perhaps the national consultation. This has now been completed, we have held another national consultation, the focus of which was our new economic policy: the philosophy of economic neutrality, the strategy of connectivity, the new economic policy based on it, the resulting 21-point economic action plan, and the specific steps that follow from it. We tend to think all sorts of things about the situation and condition of Hungary’s political ecosystem. There is still a lot of pep left in it, when one sees that 1.252 million people took part in the consultation. So in Hungarian political life there is still a lot of pep, there is interest; even during the most heated political debates, even when people sometimes seem to be dogfighting, people want to know what the important things are, what is going to happen, what the Government is planning. And if they are given the opportunity, people will have their say and give their opinion. This is important to us. There is always a debate about the value of national consultations. Everyone can have their own opinion on that. Our view is that they are very important, very important to us: they are what we stand on, they are our foundation, they are what give us backing. So after the national consultation has been completed, we can be sure that in the coming year things will happen in terms of new economic policy that have never happened before.
I cannot list all the measures here, but we will have time to do that in the coming year. I will highlight those that I feel are important and close to my heart. First of all, we are giving – rationally, I feel – young people economically sensible support for the payment of rents and mortgages, by allowing employers to arrange this on favourable terms. I think that this will be more popular than many people might think at first sight. We are giving capital subsidies to small Hungarian businesses, who in return have been willing to accept one of the biggest wage increase programmes in Hungary’s history. Over the course of three years we will be implementing a minimum wage increase of around 40 per cent, which will mean an increase of 24,000 forints in the first year and 24,000 forints in the following year. Not only have the trade unions been able to commit to this, but also the employers, who have to earn it and pay it out. And it is important to support not only students, but also young people who have chosen not to start their adult lives as students, not to go to university, but to go to work or to learn a trade and start work earlier. In other words, to those who – and the Hungarian language is limited in this area – we should call young people in work. For them too, we can finally give the kind of support that university students receive, thus saying that their work – the knowledge, skills, commitment and effort of young workers – deserves recognition. I think it is not only the 4 million forints in interest-free funding that is important – of course, that is not irrelevant – but everything that it expresses.
An important development for the coming year – something we are getting used to – is that we will be handing over projects of national economic importance. We are always handing over projects, and there are plenty of them going on in the country, but we rarely see one that we feel brings a qualitative change, a change of dimension. Such a project is a BMW factory. Minister Szijjártó is always saying that there are three or four countries in the world where the three major German car manufacturers are in production, all at the same time: I think this is true in Mexico, the United States, Germany and Hungary, with BMW also starting production here.
There is a big debate about the direction of Hungarian industrial policy, and what the future holds. Everyone knows about infocommunications, IT and so on. That it is a commonplace that one does not need to repeat; but instead one should talk about the direction in which each country should steer its own industrial wagon. And our conviction, and the discussions that have taken place so far, confirm that this direction is towards electromobility. So we believe that the big issue for the next decade is electromobility – with emphasis not on “mobility”, but on “electro”: this is about how energy generated by weather-dependent systems – by systems such as wind and solar – can be decoupled from the moment of generation and the resulting energy stored. This is what electromobility is all about. How do we store energy? Storing nuclear energy is easy. It is easy to run a gas power plant: turn it on, start it up. Even coal is not complicated. But when most of the energy, most of the electricity, is produced from green sources, from wind, for example, and with us Hungarians, mainly from solar sources, we need energy when the sun is not shining, and when it is shining we have more than we need. The way to solve this is to store it somewhere. In the coming period electromobility and the ability to store the energy produced in this way will be the greatest industrial innovation and development. This is the Hungarian position. In our view, regardless of how many electric cars are being bought and how many are not being bought, because sometimes there are more of them and sometimes fewer, the strategic direction will not change. And so for Hungary it is important that factories like this enter production next year, in addition to large battery factories – and also the first Chinese electric car factory in Europe will start production.
I can already see the signs of this. Not only in the fact that, according to our data, so far this year real wages have risen by about 10 per cent – although that is not a small increase. Yesterday, when we were preparing for this press conference, the Minister and I tried to recall the last time we had such an increase in real wages in Hungary; we found perhaps two years in the last thirty in which real wages in Hungary increased by around 10 per cent. This is what happened this year. In recent months retail sales have already expanded by 4 per cent, home lending has increased, and the number of housing transactions is spiking. Construction contracts are up 32 per cent since October last year. So I think that when we talk about a new economic policy and the 21-point economic action plan, we are not starting from zero, but we are already seeing economic developments in the last quarter that justify our optimism.
So here I would like to tell you that 2025 will be a great year for the Hungarian economy. New times are coming. I think we have noticed this particularly early, compared to others. We have started to prepare in time, and we have our plans. In this new era of great change, which I now call the era of peace, we can win, because we are starting from a good position. There are those who I think are still occupying themselves with the war era; and if they get stuck in it, they will be left behind. We have high hopes that 2025 will be about Hungary winning the era of peace. It is with these hopes that we look forward to 2025.
I am grateful that you have all sat through this, persevered and honoured us with your attention. If you have any questions, I am at your disposal.