The Hungarian government has, in terms of ideology, “more friends in the US Republican Party than in Western Europe”, Gergely Gulyás, the prime minister’s chief of staff, told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest on Friday.
In his keynote speech to the second day of the conference Gulyás said the Republicans were “significantly closer” to the government’s approach because “the Western European Christian Democratic Right has accepted that directions are set out by the Left, most recently by the Greens, and they are trying to abide by those laws”.
“When the European Parliament passes a decree that men could give birth, it is no wonder that many of us will feel that the Liberal-Green-Left mainstream of the continent is now very far from us,” Gulyás said. It is easy to offer an alternative, though, he said, and mentioned the Hungarian constitution for example, which stipulates that “a father shall be a man, and a mother woman”.
“The absurd is no longer far away from reality in Europe,” Gulyás insisted, adding that it was “extremely important” to clearly define “political positions, opinions, and unquestionable and evident truths without which you cannot make politics”.
The government, he said, had “done very much to ensure that Hungary has evident truths and that nobody should question them”. After the political regime change in 1989 “former supporters of the communist dictatorship were busy defining liberal democracy”, he insisted, adding that “they hate the government because… it has won the fourth consecutive election against them since 2010”.
Hungary now has “clear and fundamental rules” such as promoting economic competitiveness and “offering everyone an opportunity to work”, he said. In 2010, the government abolished a system of benefits which “looked communist, especially from the US” and launched public works schemes. As a result of government measures an unemployment rate of 12 percent has now been reduced to 3.5 percent, with one million more people working now than a decade ago, he insisted.
Concluding his speech, Gulyás wished US Republicans good results in the November interim elections, and expressed his hope that Hungary would continue to have “a conservative government which the US governments could consider a partner”.
MTI/Koszticsák Szilárd