The United States has gone beyond exerting its influence and is now taking an active part in the domestic political affairs of central European countries, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a holiday interview to public television. The main reasons are the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the EU-US free trade talks which impinge on the areas of energy and trade policy which are especially overt US interests, Orbán said. Hungary does not wish to be drawn into the cold war atmosphere present in US-Russia relations, he said. “They want to draw us into a conflict which can only have a bad outcome for us,” Viktor Orbán said.
Hungary’s foreign policy approximates to the German one, he insisted. The Russia-Ukraine conflict can be resolved only with the involvement of the Russians, and this position differs from the US one, Orbán said. “The Americans wanted to build a nuclear plant in Hungary, now they are not the ones building it and this hurts,” he said. Asked if there were any plans to expel US chargé d’affaires André Goodfriend, Viktor Orbán insisted that respect must be shown for Hungary but there were no actual plans to do so. On the related topic of US allegations of corruption in Hungary, Orbán said these were a “cover” under which it was promoting its new found interests in this region.
Meanwhile Hungary’s House Speaker László Kövér also criticized harshly the foreign policy of the United States. According to László Kövér the US could aim for the establishment of a political party in Hungary to take the place of the defunct liberal Free Democrats (SZDSZ). It would be logical to establish a successor to SZDSZ by 2018 to ensure inclusion in a government against radical nationalist JOBBIK, he told Saturday’s Magyar Hírlap. A global political power struggle is under way, and at stake is not only the fate of Hungary, but of all of Europe, as well as the sovereignty of Europe’s nation states and the chance for true democracy, Kövér said. Hungary does not have to work to “get the Americans on our side”, rather it must seek alliances elsewhere, alliances with other countries in central and eastern Europe, he said.
There were “a few peaceful years” after the end of the Cold War when the United States appeared to be the sole big power in the world. “But we see this is not the case. The US must still struggle with its new rivals, emerging former third world powers, and with Russia,” he said. László Kövér said it appears that the Americans will now not be satisfied with just the replacement of the current government, but are thinking in terms of replacing the whole governing and opposition elite. He noted that JOBBIK had taken advantage of protests in the past months as well as the weakening of governing FIDESZ.
via hungarymatters.hu photo: magyarhirlap.hu