Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said on Saturday that the EU was sliding toward oblivion, in a rambling anti-west speech in which he warned of a new, Asia-oriented “world order” while throwing his support behind Donald Trump’s US presidential bid, Ednews informs via The Guardian.
“Europe has given up defending its own interests,” Orbán said in Băile Tuşnad, a majority ethnic Hungarian town in central Romania. “All Europe is doing today is following the US’s pro-Democrat foreign policy unconditionally … even at the cost of self-destruction.
“A change is coming that has not been seen for 500 years. What we are facing is in fact a world order change,” he added, naming China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia as becoming the “dominant centre” of the world.
Orbán alleged that the US was behind the 2022 explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines built to carry gas from Russia to Germany, calling it “an act of terrorism carried out at the obvious direction of the Americans”. He did not offer any evidence to back up the claim.
The far-right leader’s remarks come amid growing criticism from his European partners after he embarked on rogue “peace mission” trips to Moscow and Beijing this month aimed at brokering an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Orbán is widely considered to have the warmest relations with the Kremlin among all EU leaders.
On Ukraine, Orbán cast doubt on the war-torn country becoming a member of Nato or the EU. “We Europeans do not have the money for it. Ukraine will revert to the position of a buffer state,” he said, adding that international security guarantees “will be enshrined in an agreement between the US and Russia”.
Throughout Russia’s war in Ukraine, Orbán has broken with other EU leaders by refusing to provide Kyiv with weapons to defend against Russian forces and has routinely delayed, watered down or blocked efforts to send financial aid to the country and impose sanctions on Moscow.
Orbán typically uses the annual Tusványos Summer University platform in Romania to indicate the ideological direction of his national government and to deride the standards of the EU bloc, which Hungary joined in 2004.
Hungary currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, during which Orbán has vowed to “make Europe great again” and has endorsed Trump’s candidacy in this year’s US presidential election. Orbán visited Trump twice this year at the former president’s beachside compound in Mar-a-Lago.
