Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Saturday that the European Union was sliding toward oblivion in a rambling anti-Western speech in which he warned of a new, Asia-oriented “world order” while throwing his support behind Donald Trump’s US presidential bid.
“Europe has given up defending its own interests,” Orban said in Baile Tusnad, a majority-ethnic Hungarian town in central Romania. “All Europe is doing today is following the US’s pro-Democrat foreign policy unconditionally … even at the cost of self-destruction.”
“A change is coming that has not been seen for 500 years. What we are facing is in fact a world order change,” he added, citing China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia as becoming the “dominant centre” of the world.
Orban also alleged that the US was behind the 2022 explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines built to carry gas from Russia to Germany, calling it “an act of terrorism carried out at the obvious direction of the Americans”. He did not offer any evidence to back up the claim.
On Ukraine, Orban cast doubt on the war-torn country becoming either a member of Nato or the EU. “We Europeans do not have the money for it. Ukraine will revert to the position of a buffer state,” he said, adding that international security guarantees “will be enshrined in an agreement between the US and Russia”.
Throughout Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, Orban has broken with other EU leaders by refusing to provide Kyiv with weapons to defend against Russian forces, and has routinely delayed, watered down, or blocked efforts to send financial aid to Kyiv and impose sanctions on Moscow.
Orban typically uses the annual Tusvanyos Summer University platform in Romania to indicate the ideological direction of his national government and to deride the standards of the EU bloc, which Hungary joined in 2004.
Orban said Saturday that Trump’s bid for re-election aims “to pull the American people back from a post-nationalist liberal state to a nation-state” and rehashed a slew of conservative tropes that Trump is being unfairly penalised to prevent his electoral bid.
“That is why they want to put him in prison. That’s why they want to take away his assets. And if that doesn’t work, that’s why they want to kill him,” Orban said, referring to an assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally this month.
Orban’s remarks on Saturday aren’t the first time he has used the festival in Transylvania to stir controversy. In 2014, Orban declared for the first time his intentions of building an “illiberal state” in Hungary, and in 2022, he sparked international outrage after he railed against Europe becoming a “mixed race” society. He doubled down on his long-held anti-immigration stance on Saturday, saying it is not an answer to his country’s ageing population.
“There can be no question of a shrinking population supplemented by migration,” he said in his Saturday address. “The Western experience is that if there are more guests than owners, then home is no longer home. This is a risk that should not be taken.”
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