Szijjártó: “European Companies are Pleading With Me to Import Chinese Products”

We should not believe the liberal political and media world of the transatlantic world, because it is clear that the global majority, like Hungary, wants peace in Ukraine as soon as possible, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said in Budapest on Tuesday.

Speaking at the international conference of the Budapest Peace Forum of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), the minister said that Europe is facing the most serious security and economic challenges since the end of the Second World War, and the risk of escalation is higher than ever, while the people of the continent are not at all responsible for the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
“It is a different matter that there are European political leaders who are suffering from a worsening war psychosis (…) We must also make it clear that this is not a war of the European people, but that all European people are paying the price of this war,” he said.
He said it was a serious problem that the European Union had got itself into a “hysteria of sanctions” and had allowed itself to be provoked by the world’s number one military superpower, the United States, into a race to see who would supply Ukraine with more weapons in a totally illogical way.
He pointed out that the EU’s competitiveness has “plummeted”, with energy prices several times higher than those in the US and China. In this context, he pointed out that the US anti-inflation law favors domestic firms, while the Brussels bureaucracy is forcing decisions that are bad for all European companies.

Moreover, the war is here, people are dying in Europe, and the effects of the war are most severe in Europe,”

he said.

He underlined that the sanctions imposed have not succeeded in ending the fighting and bringing Russia to its knees, and that the European economy has suffered more damage. “One year, three months, two weeks after the outbreak of the war, while debating the eleventh package of sanctions, I think it is clear to everyone that the two objectives associated with the imposition of sanctions have failed, both of them,” he said.

Szijjártó warned that escalation always affects the neighbors most severely, and therefore Hungary is in a particularly difficult position, if only because Hungarian people are also dying in the war. “And we do not want more Hungarians to die, just as we do not want any other nationality to die in this war,” he said. “That is why we are demanding an immediate ceasefire, we are demanding that peace talks begin that offer at least the hope of a sustainable peace with long-term security in our region,” he added.

The Minister also disclosed to the audience that in private he is constantly bombarded by requests from European companies present in Hungary to keep importing products and components vital to their business. With this he implied that the current drive to decouple Europe from the Chinese economy is sending shockwaves through the EU’s industry, most notably the German car industry that is heavily reliant on certain Chinese-manufactured components.

On Hungary’s stance concerning the war in Ukraine, urging peace negotiations instead weapons shipments to the war-torn country, he said that “When I speak at the Foreign Affairs Council, I will get a text message with an emoji saying ‘great’. I’ll listen to the colleague and I would not believe my ears. He reads out from A to Z, top left to bottom right, what someone from the mainstream has written. So that is the situation we are in, but it should not discourage us from looking at it from a Hungarian perspective only,” he added.

We do not want to and cannot look at this situation through American eyes, Russian eyes, Ukrainian eyes or Brussels’ eyes”,

he said. He stressed that pro-peace in Hungary is not only the government’s position, but also the will of the people, as the results of last year’s elections demonstrated.

Featured Image: MTI/Soós Lajos