The war in Ukraine has brought to light truths about European politics, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his traditional July speech at Tusványos, an annual conservative political gathering in Transylvania. As in his earlier speeches in Băile Tușnad, Romania, Orbán reflected on geopolitical trends, European current affairs, and their impact on Hungary.
The realities that the Russo-Ukraine war has brought to light, the changes brought about—or revealed—by the war, and the question of how Hungary should position itself in light of those changes were the three focal points of this year’s speech.
Regarding the tensions within the European Union, Orbán differentiated between the western and eastern parts of the bloc. Western European countries might be willing to accept a Brussels concentration of power over a smaller nation-state, while the eastern parts are firmly seated in protecting their sovereignty.
As I see it, the western part of the European Union is no longer returning to the nation-state form. So they will continue to sail in waters that are unknown to us. The eastern part of the union—us—can defend our form of nation-state.
The tension is caused not by a difference of opinion, but a difference of world views affecting, among other things, national migration policies. Orbán continued,
We believe that nation states have a biblical basis, as they are part of the order of creation … Consequently, they are not temporary phenomena in our understanding. But Westerners, quite differently, believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny that there is a common culture and a public morality based on it. … They believe that migration is not a threat or a problem but a way of getting rid of the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of the nation.
Brussels, he said, “remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy. … This left-liberal elite is organizing the transatlantic elite, which is not European but global, not pro-nation but federal, and not democratic but oligarchic.”
A problem facing the “post-national” West is that it “creates the political problem of the elite and the people, of elitism and populism,” Orbán said. As seen in the EU elections, the people’s opinions shift to the right; the elites then condemn the people for their opinions and refuse to implement this change in their policies, making representative democracy impossible:
We have an elite that does not want to represent the people, and is proud of not wanting to represent them; and we have the people, who are not represented.
While Brussels has summarily condemned the PM’s peace mission to gather information on ways to end the war, Orbán explained that he sees it as his “Christian duty to take action.” In addition, he pointed out, the EU’s founding treaty actually says that “the Union’s aim is peace.”
“If it depends on the two sides, there will be no peace; peace can only be brought from the outside,” he said, refuting EU claims that Hungary, along with other pro-peace nations and parties, are “Russian proxies.” The PM stressed the importance of putting pressure on both sides and the necessity of understanding their different viewpoints: Ukraine sees the war as self-defense against aggression that violates international law, while Russia views the war as countering the threat of deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine. These two views are crucial for understanding the conflict, regardless of whether you agree with them or not, Orbán said.
He praised Ukraine for its “strength and resilience.” Until now, he said,
Ukraine saw itself as a buffer zone. To be a buffer zone is psychologically debilitating: there is a sense of helplessness, a feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands.
Ukraine’s new self-authored mission is to be the West’s eastern military frontier region. … This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence … It is in fact the Ukrainians’ demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognized internationally.
Orbán voiced harsh criticism of European policy-making in relation to the war. He said Europe is “unconditionally following the policy line of the U.S. Democrats—even at the cost of its own self-destruction,” including sanctions that have had little effect on Russia but have been devastating to European economies. The reason the sanctions have failed, he said, is a misjudgment of Russia, its economy and industry, and its resilience and lessons Russia learned from the sanctions after its 2014 invasion of Crimea.
The traditional power center of Europe, Orbán said, has shifted: Germany and France have lost their dominance to Britain, Poland, Scandinavia, Ukraine, and the Baltics. This is why Chancellor Scholz pivoted from only sending helmets to providing Ukraine with tanks. The French and German leaderships, he said, are adapting their Ukraine policy to what a more powerful axis of European powers, influenced by the U.S., is requiring.
the Americans and the liberal opinion-influencing tools they control … punish the German-French policy that does not align with American interests.
Reactions to the war have shown that for the first time, the international community is not abiding by the West’s expectation that all take a stand against Russia “on a moral basis”—the reality, Orbán warned, is that “everyone is slowly supporting Russia.”
The Union has lost this war. The U.S. will abandon it, and Europe will not be able to finance the war, and it won’t be able to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, just like it cannot finance the running of Ukraine.
The PM also spoke on how the West has failed to understand its own loss of position in a new multipolar world.
The West is not led, its behavior is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation that I described in my presentation here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky.
The fact that non-Western states are developing into modern countries where ‘Western values’ are “demonstratively unacceptable and rejected” shows that, contrary to the insistence of the U.S. and Western Europe, the two are not intrinsically connected, the PM said, giving China, Turkey, and India as examples.
Hungary, Orbán said, can view the shift in the global order either as a threat—aligning closely with the U.S. and EU—or as an opportunity, which would require Hungary to chart its own path divergent from EU norms. That said, the prime minister was clear that he firmly supports Hungary’s EU membership and discussed conditions regarding relations with the U.S., EU, and China, highlighting the need to align with mainstream EU policy if global changes threaten the country.
The essence of the grand strategy for Hungary—and now I will use intellectual language—is connectivity. This means that we will not allow ourselves to be locked into only one of either of the two emerging hemispheres in the world economy. The world economy will not be exclusively Western or Eastern. We have to be in both, in the Western and in the Eastern.
