Dora Varro: Thank you very much for coming. I’ll start with the first question, on Austrian domestic politics. What does it say about Austrian domestic politics – perhaps about democracy – that Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen didn’t give the government mandate to the victorious FPÖ?
First of all, thank you for having me here, and congratulations on the successful democratic elections that have taken place here in Austria. Particular congratulations to the winner on what, I believe, is a historic victory, because never before has the FPÖ come first in an election. This is a breakthrough, and I think it’s of enormous significance not only regionally, but also in Europe. We respect the Austrians, which is why I’m happy to be here. We’re brothers-in-law, this Austrian–Hungarian history is an old one, and we’ve always respected each other, so I don’t want to make any critical comments about Austrian domestic policy. I’d rather say that what’s happened here couldn’t happen in Hungarian democracy. So if a party wins the election, then according to the rules of Hungarian democracy it must be given the opportunity to form a government. There’s no such thing as the people first deciding who they want to see in government, and then someone saying that, well, the people haven’t made the right decision, and that’s out of the question. That wouldn’t be possible with us. But it’s certainly the case that we’re not as developed a democracy as Austria. My second comment is perhaps more important. I think that the traditional Left–Right divide in European politics has come to an end. I’ve seen this in other countries, but I also see it happening here in Austria. It’s no longer a question of who’s left-wing and who’s right-wing. The way that the political field is shaping up is that there are three main issues, and the voters and the parties are aligning themselves accordingly. The first is the question of war. What do you want? War or peace? The second is migration. What do you want? Do you want migrants, or do you want to live among your own kind? Does Austria belong to the migrants or does Austria belong to the Austrians? Does Hungary belong to the Hungarians, or to someone else? And the third is gender, whether we defend the traditional Christian family form and protect our children, or allow some kind of gender ideology – ideological propaganda – to be carried out in their lives. These are the three big issues: war, migration, gender. And this is the new map of Europe. And I see that the Austrians have said that they want peace, they don’t want migrants, they love their children, and they want to protect the traditional Austrian family model. That, incidentally, is what was decided in Hungary two years ago.
I’d like to come back to your trip to Vienna. There was a lot of commotion and criticism when the President of the Austrian parliament, Walter Rosenkranz, first invited you as a guest. What do you think about this?
I was honoured, and I consider the President to be a great politician. We’re not talking about a novice, but about an experienced man, and I consider this decision worthy of our Austrian–Hungarian friendship. After all, we have hundreds of years of history together, and for hundreds of years we lived in the same state. Who should have been invited if not the closest relative?
I’ll come straight to the Hungarian–Austrian border. There are rumours that a refugee camp is being built near the Hungarian–Austrian border. What are they planning, what will actually be there?
The fact is that Brussels wants us to build refugee camps. So although we voted against it, the European Migration Pact was adopted, and it states that Hungary must build refugee camps and take in tens of thousands of migrants. Meanwhile there are no migrants in Hungary today. So I’m very proud of the fact that Hungary has a policy which means that today we have zero migrants. And we don’t want there to be any. But Brussels is saying, “This isn’t right, let them in and accept them, and build refugee camps for tens of thousands of people. And if you don’t, you’ll be punished.” I won’t implement this, Hungary won’t implement this, and this is why we’ve had to pay a fine of 200 million euros so far. And now, until we implement what they say, and we’re not implementing it, we have to pay one million euros every day. So I’m sending the money to Brussels as a penalty, because we’re not letting the migrants in. It’s absurd, it’s preposterous, it’s a disgrace – I can only say the worst things about it. And we don’t want to build a refugee camp. So any news that says there should be a refugee camp in Hungary is news from Brussels: the Brusselites want it, but we don’t want it. What we’re going to do now is that if they do push us and bully us, we’ll let in maybe a few migrants and we’ll immediately put them on a bus and take them to Brussels and hand them over to the leaders of the European Union in the main square in Brussels. If you want that, you’ll get it...
Can you guarantee that there will be no migrant camps, no refugee camps, on the Austrian–Hungarian border?
There will be a refugee camp there when Brussels occupies Budapest, but for now we’re defending Budapest.
Now I’ll move on to the European Union. You’ve mentioned the three main big problems with the European Union. What are the solutions?
There’s one problem on a par with these, which we haven’t mentioned, and that’s the state of the European economy. Because it looks like the European economy is suffering from pneumonia. So there are serious problems. We can see it from here – I think you can see it from Austria – and we can see it from Hungary. But more importantly, the President of France – one of the biggest countries in the European Union – has said that if we don’t change, in two or three years the European Union will perish, because we’ll lose our markets. And Prime Minister Draghi, who was President of the European Central Bank and is a former Italian prime minister, has written a report on European competitiveness, in which he says in black and white that if we don’t change urgently, then the European economy will go bankrupt. The signs of this – the signs of danger, the signs of deterioration – are also visible in the Austrian economy, in the German economy, in many places. So we have a competitiveness problem, and we have to make the European economy competitive again. At the heart of this problem is the price of energy. Because the policy that Brussels is now pursuing has led to European companies today paying two to three times as much for electricity and three to four times as much for the same amount of natural gas as, say, American companies. So there’s no competition, there’s no way to compensate for this. So we need a new energy policy in Europe, otherwise our companies will go bankrupt.
Across Europe the number of births has been falling for decades, and the Hungarian government is fighting this with large subsidies for families. But even in Hungary the number of children per woman is 1.5, which is too low for population stability and for the sustainability of economic and social systems. Why have the subsidies so far failed to raise this number above 2? And can policy even make a difference?
This is a very difficult question. I hope that I can answer your question, but this is the most difficult issue. Look at what’s behind such a phenomenon. The number of people being born is lower than the number of those who are dying. More people are dying than are being born, so the population’s shrinking, its average age is increasing, and so we’re getting older. Well, such a situation doesn’t develop in a couple of days – it’s the result of a cultural process. It’s the result of thirty or forty years. And the question is, if we want to reverse this bad trend, how many years will it take? So if we were going deeper into the forest for, say, thirty or forty years, how many years would it take us to find our way out? And I think that a few years – four to five to ten years – isn’t enough. So to reverse these slow moving trends we need twenty to thirty years of stable, family-friendly economic policy, because we need to build a family-friendly culture here. It’s not a question of more money leading to more children being born. That’s not how it works: it’s not a vending machine, where we put the money in and children come out. That’s not what this is about. It’s about a cultural understanding of life, of family, of the meaning of life, of the way we live together, of what’s important in life and what isn’t. If this doesn’t change, there will be no more children. If it changes, there will be more children. The more we respect life, the more children will be born. But it will take more time, and it will take continued, stable and predictable economic support for families. Especially support for young people who are just starting out in life, getting married, having their first child, getting a place to live, a job, feeling secure, living their lives as family people – and not as individuals who either have or don’t have children, and who see having a lifelong partner and a shared life and children as secondary. So I think it will take ten – or even twenty – years to see the change needed in this thinking. So we have to continue. The point is that we have to persevere with family-friendly policies, and then we’ll see.
And family-friendly policies rather than immigration?
You see, that’s out of the question in Hungary. So if a politician in Hungary stood up and said that he thinks immigration is a good thing and that Hungary’s problems should be solved by letting in foreigners from non-Christian cultures, that person’s political career would end the next day. The Hungarian people simply don’t accept that. So Hungarians think that if we have a problem, we’ll solve it. Bringing people here from foreign cultures isn’t the solution, because in the meantime – Hungarians think, and they’re right – they’ll displace us from our own country. They’ll change the cultural context of the country, and we’ll lose our sense of home. People love their country and feel at home in it. But if suddenly everything changes around them, people come in whom they don’t know, who come from a different religion, who have different customs, then instead of a feeling of home what develops is a feeling of alienation. It’s like being in a strange place. You don’t want to be a tourist in your own country: you want to be at home. And in Hungarians this feeling is very strong. Hungarians are a very patriotic and family-loving people, and so solving the demographic problem in Hungary with foreigners or outsiders is unthinkable.
How do you assess the current and future role of Islam in European society?
Well, there are two kinds of European countries. Some have large Islamic communities because they’ve let them in, and some don’t. Those that have let them in are now struggling with the question of how to co-exist. Hungary doesn’t belong to this group: Hungary is a country that hasn’t allowed people from foreign cultures to come in, and so Hungary has either Hungarians or foreign Christians. Therefore we don’t have a problem of coexistence with people from Islam. There are workers working in Hungary, kebab shop owners or small business owners, including from Turkey. There’s a very small number of them, and in any case they don’t live separately from us, but together with us: there’s no separate Islamic culture that they want to cultivate in opposition to the indigenous population. So we don’t have any such problem at all: migration isn’t coming, we only issue work permits to foreigners for as many job vacancies as there are, and they have to leave the country when their permits expire. So we’ve protected ourselves. Therefore we don’t have an Islamic problem. European civilisation has to reckon with the fact that there are two sides of the Mediterranean, with more children on one or other side of it. And we live in an era when there are many more children being born on the southern side, on the southern side of the Mediterranean, with fewer on the northern side. In such a situation there’s always a movement, but then one has to mount a defence. Hungarians think that in such a situation one has to mount a defence. As far as I can see, the Germans and the Austrians aren’t defending themselves. Here, for some reason, they think that if they accept large communities from the Islamic world, then a new quality of coexistence will be created, and it will be better than it was before. If someone thinks this way, they have the right to do so; Austria belongs to the Austrians, Germany to the Germans, and I don’t have a say in that, but we Hungarians certainly think that this will make life worse, not better. We see crime on the increase, the threat of terrorism on the increase, and the truth is that anti-Semitism is on the increase, homophobic thinking is on the increase, and women’s equality isn’t guaranteed either. So we don’t want to take such a risk; those who want to take it should take it, but no one should try to force us to do what they’re doing. So Hungary is going its own way. We’re an island, a conservative island, in this liberal European ocean.
This is criticised by many in the European Union. Can you imagine Hungary leaving the current European Union and forming an alternative economic community with other like-minded states?
The European Union’s greatest asset is the single market, and leaving it would make no sense. So that’s a big thing. There are a lot of bad things in the European Union: first of all ideology, then the disrespect for nations, the interference in things, the desire to take powers away from your nation. All of that is bad, but it’s politics. But the foundation of the European Union is an economic concept. And this is for the countries on the European continent to create a single market, because that will be good for everyone, it will help everyone’s economy. And this is how it is. So I don’t think that Hungary should leave the European Union’s common market. And in exchange for being part of the market we put up with a lot of political nonsense. Therefore our thinking isn’t to leave the market, but instead to change policy in Brussels. This is why we’ve founded a party in Brussels, Patriots for Europe; and we want to occupy and change Brussels, and all the political nonsense, gender, pro-migration policies, we want to throw all that out of the window. We want to finally have the kind of politics in Brussels that the people want. We want what a Viennese person in the street thinks, what a Hungarian living in Budapest or in any village in Hungary expects from Brussels: to be served, not to be given some abstract ideological theorems, as is the case today. So we’re fed up with this bubble-dwelling Brussels elite. This must be changed. This is why the Patriots are working, this is why we’ve reached an agreement with the FPÖ today, this is why we’re working together.
Yes, that was going to be my next question. Patriots for Europe is now the third strongest force in the European Parliament, but you’re still the only prime minister in it. And although the FPÖ won the election, it probably won’t be in government. Under these circumstances, what do you think can be achieved with this group?
I very much hope that others will come as soon as possible, because, well, it’s a disproportionate amount of work for me. I have my work to do at home in Hungary, but if I’m the only prime minister in the Patriots, then that obviously means a lot more work for me. If there were two of us, it would be half as much work. If there were four of us, it would be a quarter as much. So it’s clear that I have an interest in there being as many prime ministers as possible in the Patriots’ party family. We’ve not given up on Austria. I think that the Austrian Freedom Party is on the side of the people. I think that here, too, the elite has distanced itself from the people, and the Freedom Party has a good chance of sooner or later gaining majority support. So we in the Patriots family look forward to welcoming in a head of government from Austria. We think that this process will also happen soon in the Czech Republic. I also wonder how much longer the French government will be able to drag things out, and there too we hope that sooner or later a prime minister will come from France, from Marine Le Pen’s party. And then there would be four or five of us, which would change things immediately. And there’s the ECR, the European Conservatives, with whom we’re working, and there’s the Italian prime minister. So I think that gradually we’ll see the emergence of this new majority, this new centre, which is on the side of the people, which is anti-immigration, pro-family, pro-peace, and which wants to represent the interests of the European people – and this will also be reflected in the number of prime ministers.
Will we see less of the left-wing political establishment somewhat ostracising the right-wing parties, all over Europe?
Not just somewhat. This is about more than that. Because no one cares if they’re ostracising us: we’ll ostracise them, and then we’ll be even. But that’s not what this is about – it’s about something much weightier. In Europe they’ve established a liberal hegemony. So they’ve built a culture in Europe in which you can’t be a democrat if you’re not liberal. So anyone who’s not one of them is denied the possibility of being a democrat. So if in Austria or Hungary, for example, it’s not the liberal left-wing parties that win, but the right-wing parties, then they say that democracy is finished. If they win, there’s democracy. If they don’t not win, there’s no democracy. It’s a hegemonic mindset, which stems from the fact that much of the European elite, much of the European media, much of the European universities, much of the European foundations – particularly reinforced by George Soros, who’s pumping huge amounts of money into this system – have built up a concept according to which everyone must be a liberal. If you’re not a liberal, you’ve lost your democratic credentials. The way to change this is to force them to compete. Sometimes you have to beat them. And then it turns out that the quarantine they want to subject you to doesn’t work, and then they have to compete. Because I think liberals are entitled to their place in the scheme of things. No one’s trying to displace them, we just want to debate them: let them make their arguments, let us make our arguments, and the people will decide. We want to revive democracy, as opposed to liberal hegemony.
Yet the word “liberal” has changed a lot, because, you know, by liberal I suppose you’re referring more to the Left, or...
You know, the word “liberal” is wrong. It means something different in every country. Basically it’s still a positive word, because it means freedom, being liberal. But the word “liberal” gradually started to turn from positive to negative after the Left took hold of it and said that anyone who doesn’t think about politics and the world in the same way as them – the “liberals” – can’t be a democrat. So thirty years ago I was proud to say that I was a liberal, that I was on the side of freedom. But today I’d be ashamed to say that I’m a liberal, because that would mean that I’m not on the side of freedom, I’m not on the side of free speech, I’m not on the side of diversity, I’m not on the side of pluralism, but I’m on the side of liberal hegemony. So the content has changed. Therefore in Hungarian politics, “liberal” is a negative word and “freedom” is a positive word. So if I were speaking English, I wouldn’t say “liberal”, I’d say “freedom”. And I’d say “freedom-based democracy”. And I wouldn’t say “liberal democracy”. Because a liberal democracy is not democracy anymore. But freedom-based democracy is the real democracy. That’s how I would formulate in English.
Now I’ll ask you about the war in Ukraine. There are many leaders in Europe who consider you to be pro-Russian. Are you really pro-Russian, as they say?
I’m not pro-Russian, I’m pro-peace. Hungary has experience of the Soviet Union and the Russians. These are not positive experiences. So we’ve had a lot of clashes throughout history. There’s 1956, right away. So in Hungary you won’t find anyone who says that they’re pro-Russia. That’s not historically possible. But you’ll find many people who say that the Russo–Ukrainian war is a fratricidal war, that it’s nothing to do with us, and that peace should come as soon as possible. And most Hungarians would say that if a fratricidal war has broken out, because after all the Russians and the Ukrainians are fighting a fratricidal war with each other, then we want to avoid that fratricidal war turning into a world war – because that would affect us too. This is why Hungarians are pro-peace. So being pro-peace doesn’t mean being pro-Russian: it means being pro-peace. It’s in Hungary’s interest that the two countries – the two countries at war with each other – should conclude a ceasefire as soon as possible. People shouldn’t die on the frontlines, and the risk of the war spreading beyond Ukraine should be reduced. Today the risk of this is high. I’d like to reduce that. So we’re on the side of peace.
How should the EU’s strategy change in order to bring the war to an end?
First, we’re keeping the war alive. So Ukraine has already lost this war. This war would have been over long ago if we in the West hadn’t kept it alive. So if we, the West, were to say that we’re pursuing a pro-peace policy and that we want a ceasefire, and after the ceasefire peace negotiations, then that’s what would happen. It’s just up to us. Ukraine has been bled dry. They’ve put up a heroic resistance, they’ve fought heroic battles, but it’s clear that the Russian military force has overwhelmed them. In fact this war hasn’t only been lost by Ukraine, but by all the European countries that entered into this war with Ukraine. This war has been lost by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. She took the European Commission into this war and she took the European institutions into this war. We’re the ones who are unconditionally behind Ukraine, instead of wanting to make peace – or at least a ceasefire – based on European interests. What needs to change is not to say in Brussels that we unconditionally support Ukraine, but to say that we demand an immediate ceasefire and, after the ceasefire, peace negotiations. If Brussels were to change, this would happen immediately. Brussels isn’t changing now, but the Americans will change. I hope that when President Trump returns, he’ll side with a ceasefire instead of war, as he promises, and that a quick ceasefire can end the killing. Europe has lost this war. We’ve lost a lot of money, a lot of money: hundreds of billions of euros. Let’s think about what we could have done with a hundred billion euros: either here, or to prevent migration, or to use this money to develop the countries from which the migrants are coming, or just to improve the infrastructure here in our world. This enormous amount of money represents a fantastic opportunity, and we’ve sent all these opportunities and all these funds to Ukraine. We’ve given away a lot of the weapons: today much of Europe’s weapons are in Ukraine. We’ve provided – the European Union’s provided – a lot of credit, loans that the Ukrainians will never repay in their lifetime; so these loans that will never be repaid will have to be be paid for by the citizens of Vienna, of Austria, of Hungary and of the other Member States. So we’ve run into economic bankruptcy and we’re losing the war. Someone must take responsibility for this, and that responsibility obviously lies with the European Commission.
And my last question is about the US elections, which you’ve mentioned. The majority of European politicians think that it won’t be good for Europe if Trump wins, and yet you’re cheering him on. Why? What would change under a Trump presidency?
Well, first of all we don’t have to guess, because Donald Trump has already been President of the United States. So we know what that’s like. We know that he didn’t start any wars, and we know that where there were conflicts he brought them to a successful conclusion. So we can therefore believe what we saw earlier: that if he becomes President of the United States again, the chances of peace will increase. He’ll work for peace – unlike Brussels, which is working for war. If there’s a change in Washington, they’ll work for peace, for a ceasefire. This is important for Europe. So here we agree. President Trump has an explicitly anti-migrant policy, he thinks that his country must be protected and illegal migration must be stopped – unlike the current policy in Brussels. So here, too, the Americans and we here in Central Europe can come to an understanding. And he’s pursuing a pro-family policy, he’s also saying that the problem of families, the problem of population growth, mustn’t be solved with foreigners, but with an American policy that supports families. This will be good. Of course we’ll have disputes with the United States, as we’ve always had on trade issues. So we’ll sit down with President Trump, and then the Europeans and the Americans will negotiate with each other, and I hope we’ll reach a good agreement. These are matters that can be resolved. But the most important thing is that the new US election in five days’ time gives us a pro-peace US president to replace the pro-war US president we have now, which will change policy in Brussels, and which will finally bring a ceasefire in the Russia–Ukraine war.
Do you think that President Trump will succeed, that if elected he’ll succeed in stopping the war in Ukraine?
If there’s a single person in the world who can do it, it’s him.
Thank you very much.
Thank you too.