Alice Weidel and Harald Vilimsky Debate Sovereignty in Budapest

Alice Weidel, Harald Vilimsky, and Balázs Orbán

The co-chair of Germany’s main opposition party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, has addressed a Hungarian audience in Budapest. The event entitled “Sovereignty and Politics” was organized by the Mandiner newspaper and the XXI. Century Institute. Austrian FPÖ party MEP Harald Vilimsky, the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Political Director Balázs Orbán, and political journalist Mario Nawfal were among the panelists.

Reflecting on the question of what is sovereignty, they replied individually. AfD leader Alice Weidel remarked by saying that Germany is in the state of not being a sovereign nation any longer. She believes that sovereigntist political movements need to form a strong European coalition of European nation-states with sovereign parliaments. One that is unlike the European Commission lead by Ursula von der Leyen, through which 30,000 bureaucrats keep interfering with the sovereignty of nations. In Weidel’s view, this has disturbed the system of checks and balances. The AfD have doubled their support in the last federal elections to 21%, and are currently overtaking the CDU/CSU in polls. “We clearly say that we need to rebuild the EU, take back competencies,” she explained. The EU is quite dangerous for our European security, she said.

Trump and Putin want to engage in peace talks, but the EU interferes and hinders this process on purpose.

The weak German Chancellor, who as Weidel put it, “sold his soul to the left,” says that he wants to support Ukraine with long-range modern missiles like Taurus. This is very dangerous for the EU’s security. This is creating not only a dangerous situation, but also a position of weakness. This must be replaced by nation-states that protect their national interest. Their goal must be to create the conditions for peace in Europe, peace for Ukraine or Russia, and peace with the U.S.

Jetzt live: Podiumsdiskussion bei #CPACHungary2025! https://t.co/qkeHnYtLVn

— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) May 29, 2025

Sovereignty is first and foremost defined by the people of a state, a direct democracy, thinks FPÖ leader Harald Vilimsky. Secondly, one must give people the possibility to vote for their own representatives. The third condition for sovereignty is one’s willingness to cooperate with each others. In Austria last year, the FPÖ came first in the European elections, then the FPÖ joined the Patriots for Europe alliance in the European Parliament. Subsequently, in the national elections, the FPÖ came first with 29%. But the Austrian President behaved like an emperor by deciding not to give the chance to form a government to the winner. Only after this were the FPÖ given the chance to form a coalition, but the CDU and CSU from Germany had intervened, and did not permit other parties to form a coalition with the Austrian conservatives. Now the left-wing coalition is the worst that Austria ever had, but they might not last the five years, Vilimsky expressed his hopes.

Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s political director, thinks that sovereignty is about who is deciding one’s future or destiny. If one is able to decide this, one is sovereign. In Hungary, the government wants to protect the peoples’ right to decide about their own future and their destiny, he said. Hungary is the only sovereign country in the EU right now but we have major challenges. More and more power is being transferred to the center of power in the EU.

The problem is that we do not have strong national leaders; the German Chancellor or French President are not what they were 20-30 years ago.

Now the unelected bureaucrats think that it is their right to decide the future of Europeans. The direction they are leading us is a suicide mission: war, changing the demographic character of nations by migration, changing the nature of education, destroying energy infrastructure. This is the future they are bringing about. But now more and more voters are starting to realize that they as individuals are gradually losing power, and losing their opportunity to decide where their nation should go. They increasingly want to regain control over their lives.

In Weidel’s view, Germany is currently facing a number of challenges to its freedom. The voice of citizens is being undermined mostly by the mainstream media. In her views, her party, the AfD, stands for secure borders, nuclear power, freedom of speech, etc. But they are labeled by the media and intelligence services as racist, extremist, terrorist. “We are labelled as extremists by the intelligence services, and our emails or phone calls are being monitored. I have spyware on my own mobile phone. Now we are labelled as certified extremists.”

Pointing at Hans-Georg Maassen, former German intelligence chief, who was in the audience during the debate, Weidel said that it is not the intelligence community’s task to monitor other political parties. Their task is to monitor terrorists, Islamists, foreign espionage. But the current intelligence services are a complete failure. They are working on forming a pretext for other political parties to be able to ban the AfD. A quarter of voters have voted for the AfD, 10 million of them, yet they want to ban it in Germany. In no other country do they discuss banning a party with a large democratic mandate, while the 17,000 AfD members now live under the threat of a ban. All the while the German media slavishly repeat the narrative of the legacy political parties labeling the AfD as extremists. Everyone who raises a family, pays taxes, wants safety on the streets and borders, wants low inflation, etc., is a now certified extremist. Weidel thanked Hans-Georg Maassen for not surveying the AfD while in office: “you did your job very well, that is why you were fired by Angela Merkel,” she said jokingly.

Na, und? pic.twitter.com/xDTlivQA6r

— Hans-Georg Maaßen (@HGMaassen) May 29, 2025

In Balázs Orbán’s view, the greatest challenge to Hungarian sovereignty is the network financed by American oligarch George Soros that is using all its resources to undermine Hungarian democracy. Hungarians have experienced this meddling for a long time. In 2022, Soros financed the opposition unlawfully, money flowing into their accounts from the Open Society Foundations, from EU sources and NGOs. Now they have the same plan for 2026, they already have their own candidate, pointed out Orbán. Referring to EPP leader Manfred Weber, Orbán said that they openly talk about it in Brussels that they want a regime-change in Hungary. This is why the government had proposed a new transparency law: if you are engaging in Hungarian politics, you should not be financed from abroad. “We are creating a legal framework where our politicians cannot be bought. But global politicians are buying politicians shamelessly, who they subsequently use as their puppets, claimed the political director.

We need to defend the future of our country, he continued. If the European elites have decided that the next European decade is about preparation for war, then that is a serious problem. Dissenting opinions are not tolerated by them, they have already created a war budget where money cannot go to families or the economy, but to arming conflicts. They are also trying to bring in a country to the EU that is bankrupt, that is in war and is totally corrupt. They are using migration for the same end: to destroy sovereignty. They are also using legal channels to fight sovereignty.

But we have to stop the war preparations and we have to stop migration. If patriots will be unable to stop these, our children and grandchildren will have no future,”

claimed Balázs Orbán.

In conclusion, Weidel added that the green ideology is destroying the industrial backbone of Germany. The energy network has been destroyed, citizens and companies are paying an extremely high price for energy, while EU bureaucrats are telling consumers what they should produce and what they should consume. This is a major perversion of the free market system, said the AfD leader. Banning internal combustion engines is one example of this. Western leaders have decided to ban it, and to subsidize electric vehicles. Politics and bureaucrats should not interfere in the free market system, should not control what we produce and consume. Instead, they are taking away people’s wealth. Wealth is the foundation of having free citizens. If you do not have citizens who own private wealth, you have no free society, you have only dependence on the state. “Give back people the power to form their own lives independent of the state,” concluded the German politician.

Featured Image: Hungary Today