“There is no better alternative for Hungary than EU and NATO membership,” Gergely Gulyás, the Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office said in an interview.
“There is no question that one of the objectives of the regime change was precisely membership of the European Union and NATO. Whatever the disappointments we have suffered, there is no better alternative today,” Chancellery Minister Gergely Gulyás told Magyar7, a Hungarian weekly published in Slovakia.
“Nevertheless, if we are looking for the answer to the question of which countries are closest to the Hungarian worldview and values, we should clearly look to Central Europe,” he added. The minister said that he is a great advocate of Central European cooperation, he supports the Visegrád Four – Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic -, and even its extension.
In Europe, imperial aspirations have generally not been successful, but they have brought a lot of suffering,”
Gulyás pointed out.
He said that deeper ideological fault lines could lie behind the disputes between Brussels and Budapest. Gulyás said that the worst-case scenario would be for the two divisive approaches to eventually tear the EU apart.
It is not desirable that the uniformization efforts typical of Western Europe succeed. The countries there, “perhaps guided by a guilty conscience,” believe that if they have given up the values on which their societies were founded, then Central Europe must give them up too.
Hungary’s suggestion is that “we keep Europe together institutionally, politically, but we accept and respect differences.”
The biggest problem with Brussels and most of the countries of Western Europe today is that they talk a lot about tolerance, but they are fundamentally intolerant,”
the minister stressed.
Featured photo via MTI/Bodnár Boglárka