Orbán: Hungary’s sovereignty, money ‘protected’

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, addressing parliament on Monday, said “common sense won the day” in the course of the European Council summit last week, and Hungary’s sovereignty and money had been protected.

Orbán also thanked Poland for its “friendship, perseverance and camaraderie”.

“We won because amidst times as hard as the current epidemic, it was decided that economic support shouldn’t be tied to political conditions as this would hamper us from taking quick action,” the prime minister said.

He said common sense had prevailed, too, since European unity had been preserved and the European treaties defended. At the same time, migrants would not be forced on Hungarians using budget handouts as leverage, he added.

Also, what Hungary is owed in terms of European funding, the country would receive, Orbán said. The EU, he added, only worked as a community of nations, and this principle had been accepted.

What was at stake in the debate was who would end up governing Europe in the future — the governments of EU member states and the European Council or the powers associated with financier George Soros, “a network of NGOs disseminating liberal, post-national and post-Christian ideas” aided and abetted by the international mainstream media.

Orbán said that at the last moment, European governments had woken up, unanimously declaring that political issues could not be linked to financial ones, and subjective criteria should not be the basis for financial decisions. Also, they realised the legal system enshrined in the EU treaty must be enforced, the prime minister said.

He said the German presidency aimed for the recovery fund to modernise the European economy, compensate for Brexit and handle the fallout of the coronavirus epidemic.