In the Friday edition of the Kossuth Radio programme “Good Morning, Hungary”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that in the elections to the European Parliament (EP) a strong message must be sent to Brussels: “we want change, and a Europe that protects its borders on land and at sea”.

He also said that “we want to see leaders in Brussels who don’t want to organise migration, but who want to stop it”.

The Prime Minister added that there is a “liberal mafia” – including politicians, journalists and analysts – who are “flush with money”, and are working to convince the world that there is nothing that can be done to stop migration. But, he said, when it turns out that there is indeed something that can be done – when Hungary stops migration on land, Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini does the same at sea and US president Donald Trump decides to build a wall – then these opponents of migration “start to be treated as hate figures”.

Mr. Orbán stated that “the EP elections are about accepting or breaking free” from the way of thinking that such pro-migration people “are trying to force onto us”, he stressed, adding that Europe needs leaders to defend it, because Europe is the home of Europeans and Hungary is the home of Hungarians.

He said that the majority of Hungarians “feel a chill run down their spines” when they hear so many European politicians saying that migration is good, but that it should be better organised than it is today.

Asked whether there is any candidate for the post of President of the European Commission that he would support after having withdrawn his backing from Manfred Weber, Mr. Orbán said, “there will be, after the election”. He said that two days after the election negotiations will begin for the selection of future European leaders, and “We’ll see how much support has been received by which political figures in which countries”.

On the subject of Hungary’s childbirth incentives and the charge that these represent prohibited state aid, the Prime Minister called such an accusation hypocritical, because “when there is the ‘need’ to hand out migrant (bank) cards, there is of course no such problem”.

In his opinion this is because those who want to solve Europe’s demographic problem with migration abhor family policy, and vice versa: those who want to solve this problem with family policy abhor migration.

He explained that in order to guarantee the implementation of Hungary’s childbirth incentives and to avoid the European Commission launching legal proceedings after their introduction, the Government asked Brussels for its preliminary approval of the programme, but “they don't want to give preliminary consent”.

Commenting on Hungary’s first-quarter GDP growth of 5.3 per cent, the Prime Minister said that the aim is for Hungarian economic growth to always be 2 per cent higher than the EU average. This will require Hungary to be more competitive than its European competitors, and “this is what our future depends on”.

Speaking about his meeting in Washington on Monday with the US President, the Prime Minister said that Donald Trump is not from the world of academia, but from the world of business; and so he knew that there are 1,700 US companies operating in Hungary, he knew the figures for the two countries’ bilateral trade, and what the Hungarian economic model is. But “what he was most aware of was migration and the Muslim invasion heading for Europe, which the Hungarians have stopped on land”. According to Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian border fence is so successful that “it can even be seen from Washington”.

In relation to energy supply policy, he said that Hungary has an interest in an American company extracting gas from Romania’s Black Sea reserves as soon as possible, because that source of gas is the only alternative to Russia.

With regard to military cooperation, Mr. Orbán said that construction of a modern Hungarian army is under way, but before 2010 this had been “left to decay”. He added that Hungary will rely on the United States for some elements in the process of building up its fighting force. He identified one of these as the need to eliminate current gaps in the ability to protect so-called “critical infrastructure”, for which medium-range air defence missiles will be required. He said that the legal procedure for the procurement of these is progressing well.

The Prime Minister listed examples of other governments, in addition to that of Hungary, which place their own country’s interests first, and are not working to build a “world government”, but are expressly opposed to such a thing. In this regard he mentioned Israel, India, Poland, Italy and the United States.

Speaking about economic relations with Russia and China, he referred to “European hypocrisy”, citing the example of large Western European countries’ use of sanctions against Russia as a tool with which to “knock out” Central Europeans from the Russian market – thus allowing those Western countries to enter it. He described the situation related to China as being in the same: Western Europeans talk about cooperation between Central Europe and China, but their own trade with China is growing “by a staggering amount”.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)