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The balance of power in the world has shifted, and we are now suffering the serious consequences of this, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Romania’s Baile Tusnad (Tusnádfürdő) on Saturday, reported Magyar Nemzet. In his speech at the 32nd Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp (Tusványos) he claimed that the European Union has rejected its Christian heritage, and it is carrying out a population replacement.
Viktor Orbán said that in world politics we are moving towards a collision day by day, because the number one great power sees itself sinking to second place. According to the Prime Minister, a new balance must be found to replace the current world balance. Referring to the United States and China, he said that something should be done that has never been done before:
the big powers should accept that there are two suns in the sky”.
He started his speech by saying that “we have arrived here through the Romanian cohorts, but we would rather see them as a welcoming committee”, referring to the large crowds of Romanian ultra-nationalists who had gathered trying to prevent his arrival. The Prime Minister added that the Romanian Orthodox Church is also needed in the fight to defend Christianity. “They advised me not to talk about anything that might offend Romanian sensitivities,” he said. He said that he was advised not to talk about collective minority rights, but Orbán indicated that these exist and that Hungarians are entitled to them.
They wrote to us saying that we should not talk about non-existent Romanian administrative units. I think they meant Transylvania and Szeklerland, but we never claimed that they were Romanian territorial units
– he added with a pinch of irony.
The Prime Minister stressed that we are living in a particularly dangerous period in the history of mankind, these are the years of great change. Therefore, if we want to say something valid about Hungary and the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, it is better to talk about the world first. For eighty years after the Second World War, there was a balance of power. For us, Hungarians, this consisted of two parts.
In the first 45 years, the Anglo-Saxons gave us to the Soviet communists – they were not as picky about the Russians then as they are now – and in the second 33 years we lived freely, without military occupation or communists.
Although it was a big change, the balance of the world was not upset, because we managed to take the Soviet Union out of history without a war – Mr Orbán explained. But now, he continued, China has shifted the balance of the world. This is an old fear of the Western world. Napoleon himself said: let China sleep, because when it wakes up it will shake the world.
Photo: MTI/Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Benko Vivien Cher
As he said, never before has there been such a rapid and tectonic global imbalance as the one we are living in today. We are talking about the return of China, the return of a 5,000-year-old civilization of 1.4 billion people. China has become a powerhouse of production and has already overtaken the United States. What has happened is that, in the space of thirty years, China has made the journey of the Western industrial revolution and the global information revolution, which has taken some three hundred years – Mr Orbán said, adding that in doing so it had lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
The problem, the Prime Minister said, is that the gold medal already has an owner. The United States grew up after its civil war as the number one country, and when that position was challenged, the US always successfully fought back, whether it was the Soviet Union or the European Union. “The EU’s plan a few decades ago was to float the euro alongside the dollar,” he said, adding that the US had successfully fought back the EU’s attempts to take action.
In 2010, he said, both the US and the EU contributed 22-23 percent of world output, while today the EU contributes only 17 percent and the US 25 percent. The bigger your GDP, the more influence you have on the international stage – he said. He also pointed out that the dominance of the US is steadily weakening and that current trends favor Asia.
Asia and China stand before us in full superpower garb, with self-respect and a vision. They want to end a century of humiliation. They want to regain dominance over Asia. And the universal values of the US are laughed at by the Chinese,”
he said. He added: “Every day we are moving towards a confrontation. He stressed that we are in a dangerous situation in world politics because the number one power sees itself sinking to second place.
In his assessment of the European Union, Mr Orbán said that people have the feeling that the EU is plagued by anxiety and feels hemmed in. It is a rich and weak Union, which sees around it a world in revolt, millions of people heading for Europe. As he said, there was a Latin America summit in Brussels, where the most common phrases in the vocabulary of Latin American leaders were: the extermination of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, reparatory justice. This is their way of thinking. No wonder the Union feels hemmed in.
And if we look at the International Monetary Fund’s list of countries by GDP, we see that by 2030 Britain, Italy and France will slip out of the top 10, and Germany, now in fourth place, is slipping back to tenth.
The EU is like an aging boxing champion, showing off his medals but no longer willing to go back into the ring.
The big European companies do not want to break away and leave Russia, Mr Orbán said. He pointed out that seventy percent of energy companies are still present in Russia, and Western companies have paid $3.5 billion into the Russian budget. He pointed out that Brexit has upset the balance between pro Brussels federalists and naitonal sovereigntists in the EU. “Only the Poles and Hungarians are holding out, but there is a chance to make new allies,” he said. The prime minister recalled:
the federalists had openly said they wanted a change of government in Hungary and were financing the opposition with all means of political corruption.
– If you read the constitutions of European countries, you will see that the “I” is at the center of their constitutions, while the “we” is at the center of the Hungarian constitution, Mr Orbán said. He said that peace, family, law and freedom cannot be achieved alone. The Prime Minister stressed that common things in the life of the individual are expressed as relationships, while liberal constitutions were not written on the basis of relationships, but on the basis of detachment. He added that the migration crisis and the LGBTQ campaign cannot be fought on liberal foundations.
Orbán said that at the heart of the conflicts between the EU and our country lies our fundamental law. The EU is rejecting Christian heritage, it is conducting population exchanges, and it is waging an LGBTQ campaign against family-friendly nations. The Prime Minister said that Europe has created its own political class, which is no longer accountable, no longer Christian or democratic in its beliefs.
He also stressed that we do not want everyone to have the same faith, or to live the same family life or to share the same holidays. We insist, however, that we have a common home, a common language, a common culture and a common public sphere, which must be protected at all costs. That is why
we will not compromise and we will not back down, we will insist on our rights. We will not give in to political or economic blackmail
– he said.
Photo: MTI/Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Benko Vivien Cher
On the topic economic foundations Viktor Orbán said that the Hungarian economy’s performance has tripled in 13 years, from 27,000 to 80,000 billion forints (EUR 210 billion) . And by 2030, the goal is to have a GDP of 160 thousand billion forints (EUR 420 billion).
If we look at the competitiveness of the Hungarian economy, we have doubled it in 13 years.
In 2010, employment was 62 percent, today it is 77 percent, and by 2030 we want to increase it to 85 percent. Last year, 11 of our universities were among the world leaders. In terms of family support, the fertility rate has gone from 1.2 to 1.5. But for our population not to fall, it should be 2.1. We are still in trouble, so all resources must be mobilized for family policy – the prime minister stressed.
According to the Prime Minister, defense is also starting to recover. There will soon be an effective army, warriors instead of “uniformed workers”, and even a national defense industry. And Hungary is not doing badly with its 2030 program of national reunification: since 2010, the resources sent across the border to Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and other countries have increased tenfold, and now, at a time when we are facing all kinds of difficulties, education funding is being increased fivefold, by five hundred percent.
Finally, Orbán congratulated those who had taken part in the Minority Safepack and the European Citizens’ Initiative for National Regions, and who had been able to collect more than a million signatures individually.
He said that we have hit two meteors in three years, the first was Covid in 2020, which we avoided, but the war of 2022 knocked us off course. “The government is fighting to get us back on the path that will take us to 2030. The earliest we can get back on that track is around July 2024,” the Prime Minister predicted. He said that the hard part is over and inflation could be in single digits by the end of the year.
Featured Image: MTI/Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Benko Vivien Cher