PM Orbán: “Hungary belongs to Europe. We are Europe”

In an interview in a book published this week by French politician and essayist Philippe de Villiers, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is quoted as saying that “Not even in our worst nightmares did we think that, twenty-nine years after our enchained nations gained freedom and the continent reunited, Europe would again be vulnerable to imperial ambitions – those which this time do not originate outside its borders, but within them.”

Philippe de Villiers was Secretary of State for Culture in the Chirac government in the 1980s, then a Member of the European Parliament, and later the founder of the sovereigntist party Movement for France and its candidate for president of the republic. This week he released his latest book, “I Pulled the Thread of Lies, and Everything Unravelled”. In one of the chapters he writes about his visit to Budapest last December and his interview with the Hungarian prime minister.

Regarding procedures launched against Hungary in Brussels and the political attacks on him personally, Mr. Orbán said “I am not concerned about the Brussels trials […] My grandmother taught me to be humble in adversity. I must put up with all of this. I can do nothing but place myself in God’s hands.” He went on to say: “What outrages our opponents the most is the fact that in our Constitution we have written that Hungary has Christian roots; that here there is no place for multiculturalism; that a child has the right to a mother and a father; and that our nation has the right to defend its borders – which are also the borders of the European Union.”

Mr. Orbán stated that the Hungarian people have long-standing traditions of resistance to “limited sovereignty”: first there were the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire; then the khans of the vast Mongol Empire, followed by the sultans of the Ottoman Empire; and then the Soviet comrades and their tanks.