There are good and bad parts of the new EU asylum pact, but Hungarians still don’t want to live in an open society, Viktor Orbán told Reuters. The prime minister said that Trump would certainly win, and that Brexit was primarily the responsibility of the EU, the British were brave enough to resign.

Gave a three-part interview with To Reuters Viktor Orbán in Brussels, where this week a new migration proposal from the European Union was decided. The Hungarian prime minister received the correspondents of the news agency at his hotel, to whom he repeated: the devil is in the details of the pact, which has good and bad parts.

“Some taboos are gone,” Orbán said, citing as an example that the new European Union proposal puts more emphasis on the return of rejected asylum seekers. However, according to the Prime Minister, applications should not be processed in the European Union, but in so-called hotspots outside the borders. If someone does not do this and enters the EU without a permit, they should be detained, he added.

“No one can enter Hungary until we have evaluated their asylum application,” Orbán told Reuters correspondents that Hungarians do not want to live in a parallel or open society.

“We do not believe that the mixture of Muslim and Christian society is carried out in a peaceful way, nor that it offers security and a good life to people,” he said.

In the interview, Orbán reiterated on Thursday his statement that the quota would remain a quota even after the name change, which the Hungarians will always reject. However, he added that it would be premature to talk about a possible Hungarian veto of the proposal, and that all member states could take months to form their position on the proposal presented on Wednesday.

However, he left no doubt that Budapest would not agree to anything that might force Hungary to accept people from the Middle East or Africa.

“This is not acceptable to the Hungarian people. That is why we are quite stubborn in some things,” he added.

Orban then spoke about the US presidential elections.

“I am in this position even after 30 years of politicking because I always believed in my Plan A,” said the Prime Minister; By his calculations, Donald Trump doesn’t have to think about crisis plans before the November presidential election. According to Orbán, Joe Biden, Trump’s opponent, is forcing “moral imperialism” on the world, which is condemned by illiberal leaders.

According to Orbán, those who believe in the “central power” of the EU would not be happy with Trump’s re-election, but for those who see the EU as an alliance between states, it is by far the best option. In any case, if Trump remains in office, he will have a lot to clarify for both sides, especially regarding the European stationing of American troops and trade agreements. Orbán added that with Trump’s support, it will be possible to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense spending within five years, thus meeting NATO expectations.

Orbán also mentioned Brexit: the British exit was a demonstration of its national greatness, a courageous decision on the part of society. According to him, the EU can only blame itself for leaving the kingdom after the way it treated the country. However, he also claimed that Hungary would not follow the lead of the British. “Since we are not an island nation, we have become more economically integrated and it would not be reasonable to think of leaving.”

In any case, according to Orbán, the EU made a big mistake in electing Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission in 2014, not caring about the resentments of the British (and Hungarians). “We made mistakes, we made terribly big mistakes,” he said, emphasizing that the EU was not embodied by its institutions in Brussels, but by small clubs in some member states that arbitrarily provoked Brexit, among others.


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