Viktor Orbán said in Berlin that the policy is primitive in its implementation and disastrous in its impact.Continue reading
Most Hungarians have a different opinion compared to Western countries about the EU’s sanctions policy toward Russia. The government has launched a national consultation on the issue.
A new YouGov poll shows that the majority of Western countries support tough action against Russia, but not all European countries are on the same page. The Guardian summarized the survey, highlighting the positions of Hungary, Italy, and Greece, which differ from the EU mainstream.
The YouGov-Cambridge globalism project “found strong support for maintaining, and often toughening and expanding, military and economic measures against Moscow,” but it turned out that “multiple countries around the world – including some in the west – were markedly more ambivalent, or even sympathetic, towards Russia,” The Guardian reported.
According to The Guardian, “the polling, between 24 August and 22 September, found that of 13 western or anglophone countries – France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Poland, the UK, US, Australia and Canada – a ‘core group’ of 10 backed maintaining economic sanctions on Russia. Greece, Hungary, and Italy were outliers.”
While only seven percent of the respondents in Denmark, Poland, and the UK said that NATO is doing too much to help Ukraine, the figure was 22 percent in Italy, 23 percent in Greece, and 31 percent in Hungary.
Only 37 percent in Hungary and 32 percent in Greece were in favor of maintaining the sanctions, which is half of that of some western countries, The Guardian noted. The poll also showed that 31 of respondents in Greece, 28 percent in Hungary, and 23 percent in Italy favored recognizing Russian sovereignty over Crimea, even if Russia gave up none of its new Ukrainian territories; in contrast, the figures were 8 percent in Denmark and 6 percent in the UK.
According to a recent poll by the Nézőpont Institute in Hungary, every second Hungarian thinks that the EU sanctions hurt Europe more than Russia.
The Hungarian government launched a national consultation on the sanctions last week. Among other leading politicians, István Hollik, communications director of the governing Fidesz party, urged Hungarians to take part in the consultation. “When millions of Hungarians express their views on the sanctions, Brussels cannot ignore them,” he said.
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