Zsolt Törőcsik: Yesterday on his social media page Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wrote that the Ukrainian energy threat has stepped up a gear. He was referring to Wednesday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers, at which another package of sanctions was announced. A few weeks ago the European Union decided to completely stop energy imports from Russia by 2027. I’ll be asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán what impact this would have on the Hungarian economy and on Hungarian families. Good morning.
Good morning.
The European Commission refers to stopping energy imports as a way of supporting Ukraine, but this would mainly affect Hungary and Slovakia, which are opposed to supporting Ukraine. Is this about helping Kiev/Kyiv, or more about teaching Budapest and Bratislava/Pozsony a lesson?
Or a third thing. If you were a prime minister – not in Hungary, for simplicity’s sake, as that position’s filled – but, say, in the Czech Republic or Germany, you’d pursue policies to make energy as cheap and easily accessible as possible for people. I suppose you’d do that. This is what I’m doing, and so is the Slovakian prime minister. Now, by comparison, the others are supporting all kinds of measures that, if we let them, would increase the price of energy for households and businesses using energy in Hungary and the Czech Republic and Germany. So they’re working to make energy more expensive and more difficult to access. This is absurd! But obviously the people sitting in those prime ministerial offices aren’t fools, so the fact that they’re doing the opposite of what we’d normally think is right must make some sense. And there’s only one answer: they’re not trying to help their own countries’ families and businesses with their energy price policy, but trying to hurt the Russians. So for them harming Russia and through this helping Ukraine is more important than what happens to their own families and their own businesses. This is the essence of the dispute. We take the opposite view. Every week I’m there I engage in battle with them, and I exercise Hungary’s right to prevent sanctions on Russian energy being extended to Hungary; because if we allowed that to happen, all sorts of problems would arise. Now, of course, the Ukrainians are on the same page as the European leaders – and in fact the European leaders think that if they harm the Russians, they’ll be helping the Ukrainians. So in fact the Ukrainians are behind the whole policy of pushing for energy price increases. Therefore it’s by no means unjustified to talk about a Ukrainian energy threat. The Ukrainians are demanding something from Europeans that would destroy European families. This also threatens Hungarian families. So, to be clear, the plan is that no one should be able to buy natural gas and oil from Russia. Now, the first step towards this goal was taken earlier, because the gas tap has been turned off. What I’m saying now is more for the older listeners, because the younger ones might not remember it, and in fact they might not even have been born then; but in the early 1990s, when Ukraine was not yet independent, there was the constant danger – which we’ve talked about here – that when the Russians had to withdraw from Hungary they would turn off the gas tap. To Hungarian minds this was the biggest threat. In the meantime Ukraine became independent and it guaranteed the passage of natural gas and oil supplies from Russia through its territory. This has now been terminated. So the Ukrainians shut this down some months ago. And if over the past six or seven years we hadn’t been able – with persistent and wily work, but here I won’t recount the various episodes in that process – to build the pipeline system from the south to Hungary, then following the Ukrainians’ decision Hungary would either have no access to natural gas at all, or only at astronomical prices. Now if the Ukrainians were to succeed in getting the EU to completely ban the purchase of energy from Russia, then according to the calculations which our experts have carried out, this would mean that every year Hungary would have to pay 800 billion forints more for energy purchased from elsewhere instead of from Russia. This 800 billion forints is the amount that we distribute to families every year under the heading of reductions in household energy bills. So it would mean that this amount would simply evaporate. Now, if instead of looking at it at the national level I break this 800 billion down according to the number of households, everyone listening to us should understand that if the Ukrainians succeed in pushing through their plan, the Ukrainian plan in the European Union, everyone’s electricity bills will double. And heating bills will quadruple. So when they hear the news that there’s this or that debate going on in Brussels, it’s not some debate that’s remote from their lives: it’s a debate in their own homes. At stake is what will happen to the electricity and heating bills for Hungarian homes. So I repeat: heating bills would quadruple and electricity bills would double. This would be the consequence of the Ukrainians’ demand, this is what the Ukrainians want, and this is what we must defend ourselves against. This is a constant threat, a constant battle that Péter Szijjártó and I – depending on whether the foreign ministers or prime ministers are negotiating it – are constantly fighting.
Now, this extra cost of 800 billion forints would obviously mean extra expenditure for the budget. Under these circumstances, how could the reductions in household energy bills be sustainable?
No one has given an answer to that yet. In Brussels I say that I understand that they want to harm Russia and help the Ukrainians, I understand all that – but why are the Hungarians being made to pay the price? Where’s the money? Give it to us! And then we’ll be even. So we can be negotiated with: if they’re willing to pay for the negative impact of their policy on Hungary and compensate us for it, then that’s a different situation. But for the time being, they’re not lifting a finger and think that we Hungarians should pay this amount. But I’ve always told them that this isn’t our war, and we won’t allow Brussels to make us pay for its support for Ukraine.
We’ll come back to the relationship between Ukraine, the EU and Hungary. But as you’ve mentioned the southern pipeline system, at the informal meeting of the Turkic states you said that Hungary owes its secure energy supply to close cooperation with the Turkic countries. How can energy coming from that direction or from there counterbalance these plans from Brussels, or the loss of Russian energy carriers?
Again, I’ll rely on older listeners remembering this. There was a debate back in the 1990s – which continued into the 2000s – about building a pipeline called “Nabucco”, which would bypass Ukraine and enter Hungary. Then this was rendered impossible. Later we Hungarians, when we saw the danger, after the Crimean war, realised that we absolutely had to have another pipeline in addition to the Ukrainian one – otherwise we could land in big trouble. So we did two things. First of all, we built the Slovak–Hungarian natural gas interconnection. Everyone was against this, saying that it made no sense, that gas would never flow through it, and that the gas would come through Ukraine. Why the hell did we need to spend a lot of money on a Slovak–Hungarian pipeline? And the other decision we took was to build pipelines southwards, in a crafty way, from Hungary down south through Serbia to Bulgaria and Türkiye – not announcing new pipelines, but connecting the existing ones and thus increasing capacity, and putting new compressor stations into operation. It was a large, coordinated operation. There was no war then, so let’s say we slipped under the radar with it. And when the war broke out, and there was this problem of insecurity of energy supply from Ukraine, it turned out that the Slovaks wouldn’t have access to natural gas if we hadn’t built the Slovak–Hungarian pipeline. Now they’re getting it from us, and because of this they have security there. So it turned out that short-term business considerations may not have been in favour of this, but long-term energy security considerations were. And it was the same in the south. There Türkiye is the key country, because Russian natural gas comes to us from Türkiye, Azerbaijani natural gas goes there from Azerbaijan, and then the energy comes from there, from the south, towards Hungary. This is the system. To do this we had to win over the Turks. They’re a big country – if you’re that big you have to be brave; so the Turks have been brave enough to say that whatever the West tells them they won’t allow Russian natural gas to be prevented from entering and leaving Türkiye. In addition, we’ve agreed with the Azeris that natural gas can come from there to Türkiye, and subsequently to Hungary. As an aside, because this is no longer an energy security issue, but rather a price issue, we have another deal with the Azeris. Hungary doesn’t have enough energy of its own. We have about 1.5 billion cubic metres of gas that we produce in Hungary, and we’re drilling to see if we can find more, but that’s it. Every year we need between 8.5 and 10 billion cubic metres. This is why we’re vulnerable. This is why we’ve now concluded – or experts have suggested – that MOL and MVM – a private and a state company – should try to buy into natural gas fields in the outside world, and get involved in natural gas production. This may not be in Hungary, but it can be owned by us. And we’ve managed to reach an agreement with the Azeris to let us in as owners of small stakes of 5 to 10 per cent in the world’s largest natural gas fields. But we have our own energy source – admittedly in another country and not Hungary, but we own it. So there are hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of natural gas in Hungarian ownership. This is going out onto the world market, and with this we can do something to bring down the price of Hungary’s energy needs. So there’s a lot to do for a country like Hungary, which has lost the areas where its energy resources used to be located. In such cases, we have to come up with something. So if you’re not smart, you’ll be taken to the cleaners. Now, in Brussels, in particular, we not only need to be clever, but also strong, and we must try to prevent this Ukrainian attempt to completely ban Russian natural gas from Europe; because there’s no point in us having a pipeline if they don’t allow natural gas to come in through it.
The EU sees Ukraine’s accelerated accession as another means of supporting Ukraine. Last week the enlargement commissioner said that she has almost a thousand people working to get Ukraine into the EU as soon as possible. And here are two recent news stories. In one, the Ukrainian government is asking the EU to provide financial support to the Ukrainian army from 2026 onwards; meanwhile 26 MEPs from five political groups in the European Parliament have called on the Commission to freeze all EU funding to Hungary. What financial burden is Europe prepared to shoulder for Ukraine, and what drives its commitment to mobilising such resources for Ukraine’s soon as possible EU membership?
Let’s look at this army issue first. So, for some reason, these brave leaders in Western Europe have got it into their heads that they’re going to conclude an agreement with the Ukrainians which includes Ukraine keeping a future army of about one million men permanently under arms – not only for the duration of the war, but also in the longer term. And we Europeans will be paying for the salaries, equipment, operation and training of these one million men. The Westerners say that the justification for this is that it represents our defence. Meanwhile, by the way, our armies are weak, and we don’t have enough money for equipment or soldiers. And so instead of strengthening our own Western European armies, we’re now going to pay the wages and ensure the upkeep of a Ukrainian army of a million soldiers. This is quite aside from the fact that Ukraine is an unstable political state, no one can say what kind of government will be in office in the future, and the army is always under the influence of the Government. So we’ll be using our money to serve up a million-strong army to future Ukrainian governments, whose nature we know nothing about. This can only mean trouble! So this could even become a serious security risk for Europe. We could end up financing an army whose intentions will not always be friendly towards us – or at least there will be no guarantee of that. So it’s a confused idea, but they want to spend a lot of money on it. We’ve made it clear that we don’t agree with this, and we won’t send Hungarian money to Ukraine to be used to keep Ukrainian soldiers under arms. Now the other issue is membership. It’s related to this, because it’s much easier to make pro-Ukrainian decisions, financial decisions, if Ukraine is in the EU than if it isn’t. The rules on financial support for an EU Member State are completely different from those for a country outside the Union. The latter is more difficult. We want to keep Ukraine out anyway, because if we let it in it will suck up all our money like a sponge. And it’s the people of Central Europe, including Hungary, who will pay the price. So we don’t want that. Now there’s a debate about this in Hungary, because there are Hungarians who support Ukraine’s membership, and there are those who don’t. There was also a party referendum: the Tisza Party held its own party referendum on what its supporters think, and 58 per cent of them said that the party should support Ukraine’s membership. But that was just a party vote. We need to acknowledge that there are parties whose supporters are 58 per cent in favour of Ukraine’s membership. Now we’re conducting a general, nationwide vote, called “Voks2025”, so that everyone can have their say, regardless of party affiliation, enabling us to have a national position on this issue. I’m confident that this will confirm the Government’s negative position: it’s negative position on giving membership to the Ukrainians. But we shall see – there are still a few weeks to go. Yesterday I saw that more than one million people have already cast their votes, and I urge everyone to make their voices heard and their opinions heard on this important, significant issue with long-term implications. Let’s not allow others to decide this for us!
The Government has also linked the scandal, dubbed the Ukrainian spy scandal, to its opposition to Ukraine’s accession to the EU. In Parliament more than two weeks ago, you said that you knew there would be a confrontation with the Ukrainians, but you were prepared to meet it. Compared to what you knew and thought at the time, how strong is the confrontation we’re seeing now?
What I saw earlier is what we could call the intelligence dimension. So we’ve seen that there’s intense Ukrainian espionage activity in Hungary. Let’s be grown-up about this: every state has some kind of intelligence system, even within an alliance system. There’s a level of this that we tolerate in the normal course of international relations: even our allies take a peek in here; and if we really need to, we’ll look around outside. But this is at a low level, and it’s part of normal international practice: there’s always one staff member or another in an embassy who deals with national security issues, and so on. But what we’ve seen is that Ukrainian activity in Hungary has increased a great deal, and they’ve also been planning operational actions. And we’ve also seen that they’ve built up a fabricated story of arresting spies in Ukraine who are considered to be Hungarian. Of course we have nothing to do with this. And they’re making information requests related to state leaders regarding the functioning of Hungary. So we’ve seen this situation heating up and escalating. We’re prepared for that. So we’re ready to counter this: we took countermeasures here as soon as Ukraine accused us of involvement in a Hungarian spy case. They’re running a disinformation campaign. And we’ve submitted a law to Parliament, the transparency Act, which won’t allow Ukrainians to operate a pro-Ukrainian propaganda network here, as they’re doing right now. There’s a pro-war, pro-Ukrainian propaganda network operating in Hungary, shoving pro-Ukrainian positions in our faces and into our heads on a daily basis. So we’ve also taken the necessary steps. We expected this. What I didn’t expect, or in fact didn’t even think of, is that the opposition parties had such deep links with the Ukrainian secret service – even though we knew that they’re pro-Ukrainian, because they support Ukraine’s EU membership. So in essence the Hungarian opposition parties have Ukrainian connections, and when they come into Hungarian political life through the opposition parties the Ukrainians move forward like a knife through butter. This is a problem that still needs to be addressed.
This is denied by the parties involved, and the Tisza Party has repeatedly done so. But what could be behind this, or what could be the intention behind these parties having such links?
I don’t think they’re denying it. Maybe I’m misunderstanding things, but I’ve seen videos in which Ukrainian agents identified by the Hungarian state are providing services, organising visits and building contacts for Hungarian opposition parties. This is undeniable: it’s in their own voices, in images of them on the web or in the digital world, in the digital space. It’s about that, because the compass needle of every action points in the same direction: that Hungarians must be persuaded to support Ukraine’s membership of the EU. This is why the Ukrainians have mobilised their contacts within the Hungarian opposition, this is why they’re organising disinformation operations, and this is why they’re carrying out intelligence operations on Hungarian territory. This is in order to somehow force the Hungarian government and the Hungarian people to agree to Ukraine’s accession to the EU – even if it costs us an arm and a leg. So somehow they have to get us to make a decision against our own interests. Let’s face it, this isn’t easy, and it requires a great deal of effort and major resources. I understand that this is important to them, and this is what they’re doing. They’re deploying serious tools, they’re mobilising major resources, and they’ve built up strong links with the Hungarian political elite.
You’ve just mentioned the transparency Act, which was debated in Parliament this week, as a means of stopping Ukrainian propaganda. But some sections of the Opposition and the press see the intention behind this law being an attempt at silencing media critical of the Government. What’s the justification for what many consider to be very severe regulation?
As I see it, this regulation is rather light. So if I compare it with, say, US regulation, it’s very light. There’s only one objective behind it, and we should be able to agree on that. I thought, by the way, that there would be agreement on it. I even thought that the opposition parties would agree, and I even thought that perhaps the civil, pseudo-civil and media organisations concerned would publicly admit that the majority of the Hungarian public believes that anyone who’s involved in politics shouldn’t be accepting funds from abroad. I think that in Hungary, too, there could be a national consensus on this. These are the grounds on which the law stands. This is its purpose. So anyone who’s involved in politics in Hungary – whether a party, a pseudo-civil society organisation, political civil society organisation, or the political media – shouldn’t be allowed to accept foreign funding. This is because, when they come across an opinion, Hungarians won’t know whether a civil society organisation or a media outlet is writing what it writes as its own opinion or because it’s being paid and receiving money from abroad – and the public can’t be expected to be constantly looking behind the curtain to see whether a writer’s expressing their own opinion, or being paid from abroad. It makes a difference. When I read a news item, I also want to know whose opinion I’m reading. So I think that making this possible and making things transparent is obviously in the national interest. In fact, there’s been no such regulation because we thought that this was the way it should be, that no money should be accepted by political organisations. There’s also a rule for political parties regarding what they can and cannot do. This rule doesn’t exist today for such political civil society organisations, so we thought we’d create it. Now, we can argue about the technical issues, one way or the other, but we should agree on the goal: anyone who’s involved in politics in Hungary shouldn’t be allowed to accept money from abroad.
In addition to the transparency Act, this week Parliament also started debating the budget. The Minister for National Economy said that the budget puts families with children first, and indeed it has very ambitious targets. How much leeway, how much money will there be next year to pay for these family support measures?
I was scratching my head when we started drawing up the budget, because there’s something that’s the basis of the budget, a question, to which there’s no 1,000-per cent certain answer. That question is whether in 2026 there will be war or peace. Will the EU succeed in ensuring that Hungarians’ money goes to Ukraine, or can we prevent this? Because the budget has to be based on some kind of assumption. And our thinking was that in 2026 we’ll be able to prevent – not only in Budapest, but also in Brussels – Hungarian money going to Ukraine. So we reckon that we’ll manage to keep the money needed by us – the Hungarian economy and the Hungarian people – inside Hungary. And we thought that we don’t know whether there will be peace, but we believe that there will be a ceasefire, and that tension related to the war will be lower than it is now. Put simply, we believe that the Trump peace policy will succeed in bringing down tension related to the war, and consequently the Hungarian economy will suffer ever fewer losses related to the war. But for those who aren’t aware, over the past three years Hungary’s economy has lost about 20 billion euros because of the war. So if that money were still here in the Hungarian economy, everything would be booming. But now nothing is booming – because at the moment, as long as the war continues, it’s difficult for the economy to recover. I’m confident of this, I haven’t given up, and I urge everyone – including in the Government – to stop talking about the difficulties we’re facing, about the problems in the German economy, how the war is destroying them, how high energy prices are holding back growth in Europe, and how this is affecting Hungary. All this is true. But if I were a voter listening to that, it wouldn’t interest me so much – because we pay politicians to find a solution in such a situation. So my focus is that whatever the situation is, we have to set our own goals, and we shouldn’t abandon our goals. And those goals should be reflected in the budget. Because a goal that’s not in the budget is just hot air: if there’s no money behind it, no economic power behind it, then you can talk about it, but it won’t come to anything. And the goal that we’ve set ourselves – and I can guarantee the Hungarian electorate that in 2025 and 2026 we’ll achieve this – is for the budget to support families, and mothers in particular. So I can guarantee that in October 2025 mothers who have three children will be exempt from income tax for the rest of their lives. And the budget, the Government and I guarantee that from 1 January 2026 mothers who have given birth to two children and are under 40 will also be exempt from income tax for the rest of their lives. And I can also guarantee that in 2027 all Hungarian mothers under 50 will be exempt from income tax – and subsequently those over 50, so that in the end every mother who has given birth to at least two children will be exempt. This is unprecedented in global terms: there’s nothing like it anywhere. This is our own Hungarian national goal, it’s our common goal. We’ll achieve it come hell or high water, if pigs start flying, whether or not there’s a war. So let’s not put the blame on circumstances, but let’s achieve the goal that we’ve set ourselves. That, for me, is what the budget is about.
Let’s talk about one more thing in the context of the current economic situation. According to KSH [Hungarian Central Statistical Office] data, investment performance fell by 12 per cent in the first quarter. At the same time BYD, the Chinese car manufacturer, has announced that, in addition to production, it will bring its development centre to Hungary. In the current situation, what’s the significance of such an investment?
According to the classic economics texts, economic growth has two sources: investment/development, and consumption. Today in the Hungarian economy there’s less new investment and more ongoing development. So if we look at where the energy for growth comes from today, I see that more of it comes from consumption than from production. This is good in the short term, because it means that people have money, they can spend it, they’re consuming, the budget collects VAT on it, and then public finances as a whole can be kept in balance. But it’s not good in the longer term. So the healthy thing is for there to be a sufficient amount of investment every year, and for that investment to become an energy for growth. This is why we launched the “100 Factories Programme”, in which the number of factories was later increased to 150: so that there would be investment. Moreover, in Hungary it makes a difference where the investments are made. We need both large and small ones, because the majority of people work for small and medium-sized enterprises, and we must support them very strongly – and this is what the Sándor Demján Programme is all about. And then there are the large ones, which operate with world-class technology, and which we need. This is because even though Hungary’s getting stronger, we’re not strong enough to be at the forefront of technological development – although in some areas we are indeed capable of world-class development. But not in large volume, not on a large scale. For that we need foreign investment using this technology – and in the field of electromobility the Chinese are the best. We always have to bring in the best – I don’t care whether they’re Eastern or Western: what I care about is the fact that Hungarians need the best, and that’s what we have to get. The Chinese lead the world in electric cars and electromobility, so we need to bring them here – not just in terms of production, but also in terms of development. This is happening now, and then there will be research. In my view it’s a major success that around two thousand people – most of them development engineers – will be working to develop Chinese cars in Hungary. I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to bring this to fruition.
Among the subjects I’ve been asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán about were energy security, Ukraine’s accession to the EU, and next year’s budget.