“Hungary is not anti-EU at all, and in fact would like to return to the European Union’s fundamental values, for instance with regard to preserving national sovereignty”, the Government Spokesperson said on Hungarian M1 television’s Thursday evening current affairs program.

With relation to the recently held National Consultation, Zoltán Kovács said: “Hungary comes first”; during the past two years the Government has proven that it represents the interests of the Hungarian people with all of its decisions.

“There is a huge gap between the thinking of the Brussels bureaucrats and many Brussels politicians, and the logic of the people of Europe; the future of Europe is in the hands of the European people”, he said.

According to the Government Spokesperson, one of the important topics of the upcoming year, including the Hungarian presidency of the Visegrád Group (V4), will be to prove that “just because we don’t agree with what Brussels is proposing with relation to a few, otherwise important, points doesn’t mean that we are in any way anti.-European, but that we would in fact like to return to the fundamental values of the European Union”.

Among these, Mr. Kovács mentioned that nothing more should be taken away from national solidarity, because this is what guarantees the strength of Europe via strong nation states.

“We must pinpoint those areas, including amongst others joint defence policy, certain economic policy issues and digitalisation, in which it makes sense to deepen cooperation, and Hungary is ready to do just that”, the Government Spokesperson said.

He stressed, however, that the Government will not give ground with relation to areas in which it is ‘impossible” to achieve a consensus, and that includes migration, because the people of Hungary “will never agree” to having the resettlement of migrants “forced onto them”.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)