In Tiszaújváros on Monday, at the inauguration of a synthetic rubber plant for the oil and gas company MOL Group and the Japanese JSR Corporation, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that Hungary is growing, and this is something that even a blind person can see. He added that Hungary is growing because it is safe.
In relation to the upcoming parliamentary election, the Prime Minister stressed that the country is facing an important decision, as “investments and developments only occur in a country if that country is safe, if its legal system is secure, if its political life is stable, and if the reins of government are not being jerked continually from right to left”.
He also said that investments are only implemented in countries “where there is physical security: where there is no threat of terrorism and public safety is not threatened significantly”. He confirmed that there will be no immigration in Hungary, and “Hungary will not be an immigrant country: in Hungary public safety will not be endangered, and there will be no acts of terror”. Large foreign investors can continue to come to the country, and large Hungarian investors are likewise encouraged to continue their developments, the Prime Minister stressed.
He confirmed that if the current governing alliance wins the election in April, there will also be economic growth of 4 per cent every year over the next four years. In his view, “even in the midst of an election campaign, nobody is challenging the basic premise that Hungary has developed in recent years, and will continue to develop in the future”.
In his speech Mr. Orbán described MOL as the pre-eminent national company in Hungary, and said that with the inauguration of this plant Tiszaújváros has taken another step towards becoming Central Europe’s most important chemical industry centre. In his words, “in Central Europe the future is written in the Hungarian language”.
Praising MOL, he highlighted that from a national point of view the company’s investments are the most important. “The simple fact is that we love MOL – and most of all we love it because it is ours. It is a Hungarian company, a national company”, he said, adding that “in it we see the work of Hungarians”. He said that MOL is the embodiment of Hungarian work, discipline, enterprise, the desire to take action and the will to work.
r. Orbán gave five reasons why he regards MOL as the pre-eminent national company: the company provides jobs for 8,000 people in Hungary; it is an important company also by Central European standards; without MOL the country would have no energy security; it is strong enough to attract large international companies to Hungary; and it pays large amounts of money into the Hungarian budget in the form of taxes. “We would like the entire Hungarian economy to be like MOL: large scale, modern, competitive and Hungarian”, the Prime Minister said.
In his view, the Hungarian economy will be in a state of equilibrium if, alongside international companies, large Hungarian firms also emerge and strengthen. Speaking about the joint enterprise between MOL and JSR, he said that “This is the path of the future: joint investment and development between a large Hungarian company of Central European significance and a reputation throughout the whole of Europe, and an even larger international company. In the future we would like to see as many such cooperative projects as possible”.
The Prime Minister also thanked Japan, as Japanese companies provide jobs for 25,000 people in Hungary. Regarding the Tiszaújváros synthetic rubber factory, he said that if MOL wishes to implement projects similar to this one in the future, it can count on the Government.
He observed that MOL will be investing 1,300 billion forints up until 2030, and that this sum is higher than the Hungarian investments of Mercedes and Audi combined.
The Prime Minister also described how some years ago Hungary had reacquired MOL stocks from Russia, after tough negotiations in which “we had sweated blood”. He recalled how, when they had finally bought back the tranche of MOL shares, the delegation “[gave] thanks to God after having come back from Moscow” and talks with the “Russian buyer – who was incidentally the now newly-elected President of the Russian Federation […] who is not exactly the weakest kid on the international block”. Mr. Orbán pointed out that “if we had not been able to buy back that large share in MOL, then it would be hard to imagine us being able to contribute funds from the Hungarian taxpayer to investments of this kind [in Tiszaújváros]”.
(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)