In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, the prime minister was faced with the fact that the rule of law mechanism did not address the issue of migration, and Orbán said it was not a fantasy, the amendment of the European Parliament would have given a wide margin for sanctions.

An interview with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán titled “Manfred Weber offended the Hungarian people” by the conservative German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. In their conversation, Orbán answered no to the question of whether it was true that in his last meeting with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor raised her voice.

According to Orban

Angela Merkel would be a “strong woman” and the raised voice would be a “sign of weakness”.

At the recent EU summit on the budget, the recovery fund for the coronavirus epidemic and the agreement on the rule of law mechanism, he said the European Parliament linked the recovery fund to a vote on a mechanism of the state of law without objective criteria, which he said was unreasonable.

“Why should we put even more pressure on an issue when we are in a difficult crisis?” – raised the issue that the mechanism could be negotiated at a later stage, with the aim of applying binding criteria to all 27 Member States.

The current solution makes it possible, so it is a triumph of common sense

Viktor Orbán repeated his previous arguments, then added that Merkel had made a brilliant proposal. He also told the German newspaper that the European Parliament was “overestimating its role”, which was a mistake.

“We can deal with the myth of Viktor Orbán’s infallibility”

Although Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is presented as the winner after the EU ring, political scientist Dániel Hegedűs of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin says this is not the case. By changing the veto, Orbán and Morawiecki created exactly the climate they wanted to avoid.

When asked if he compares Brussels to Moscow, Orban said he “doesn’t miss much anymore.” Once the Moscow Central Committee established the ideological direction, Vera Jourová “wanted to introduce a similar supervisory authority without a clear legal definition and objective criteria for all” through the mechanism of the rule of law. According to him, financial sanctions could have forced member states to implement “ideologically defined policies”.

According to Orbán, the “real debate” is about family policy, immigration policy and cultural issues. And before the suggestion that the indicated cases are not covered by the agreement on the mechanism, Orbán said that it was not an “imagination”, since the first version of the EP supplement said that the mechanism could be extended to any subject and many documents were received from Brussels. , according to which, for example, the reception of refugees is also subject to the rule of law mechanism. Orbán repeated, he does not want migration.

The EP’s definition of the rule of law is “arbitrary” and could mean that family policy could even be covered by the mechanism at any time.

As for Manfred Weber, leader of the PE Group in the European People’s Party (EPP), he said that he had agreed with a German politician at a meeting in Budapest two years ago to support his election as president of the European Commission, but two days later Weber he said publicly that he did not want to win Hungarian votes. the office.

“Everyone here asked: what kind of person is this? Do you think we are second-class Europeans? This case was not about me, but about insulting the Hungarian people. We have lost confidence in him,” said Viktor Orbán.

He added that he found allegations about the Hungarian media situation in the ranks of the EPP ridiculous. He stressed that “objective studies show that the market share of government-critical media exceeds 50 percent.”

As he said, the problem is more with the EPP, since Manfred Weber wants the same coalition in Brussels as in Berlin, where the Christian Democrats rule with the Social Democrats. This means that “soon it will not be possible to distinguish between conservatives and socialists.”

“We are not the ones who will leave the EPP, but us,” said Viktor Orbán, who stressed that the party’s family must maintain its “Christian-conservative character.”

He said about Brexit: with the departure of the British, the EU became unbalanced, “becoming more and more ideological”, thus representing the direction of higher taxes, more states, less competitiveness. Through the dominant influence of Germany and France, their economic policies are “increasingly socialist”, with redistribution more important than performance and modernization.

To lag behind in global competition, “Brussels’s response is not to strengthen performance and competitiveness, but to increasingly protectionism.”

“We are protecting ourselves because we are weakening. This is not a good direction,” the prime minister said.

On the loan-financed recovery fund, Hungary has always been critical of the idea, but “since many southern states would collapse unaided, we agreed in solidarity.”

On the fact that the so-called tight-fisted group of four countries, Austria, Denmark, Holland and Sweden, also oppose joint indebtedness, but also criticize the corruption situation in Hungary, Viktor Orbán emphasized: “the fact that we agree with some countries on certain issues it does not mean your company would be attractive to us “and corruption” is not more widespread in Hungary than in Austria, France or Germany “. (Orbán has made this argument before, but Transparency International has previously stated that corruption has become systemic in Hungary – ed.)

He added that warnings from the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) are followed in Hungary in many more cases than in any other EU member state, and the prosecutor’s office, unlike Germany, for example, is not supervised by the government but by the legislature.

Regarding the legislative majority of two-thirds, he said that although we are “criticized for its broad support, I wish Germany the same”, since it is very important that the majority of the population agree on the most important issues.

Regarding the treatment of the coronavirus epidemic, he stressed that in Hungary “there is much less resistance to the measures than in Germany.”

This can also be attributed to the national defense consultation, which ensured “basic democratic support” for the measures.

“Let’s not forget the two principles of democracy of the ancient Greeks: democracy has to do with good governance and participation. This is what we do in Hungary,” said Viktor Orbán.


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