Hungarian foreign minister: progressive liberalism is not the only path

The liberal mainstream cannot accept that “progressive liberalism is not the only progressive direction,” Péter Szijjártó, the minister of foreign affairs and trade, said in a podcast on Sunday.

Hungary has had a “patriotic, Christian Democratic, anti-mainstream and non-progressive government in office over the past twelve and a half years, which, in addition, is successful, which the liberal mainstream cannot digest”, he told Zoltán Kovács, the state secretary for international communications and relations, in The Bold Truth about Hungary podcast.

“As long as we break investment records each year, with firms coming from countries with which we are on explicitly bad political terms to invest billions of euros here, we are safe,” Szijjártó said. Business people will make important decisions based on facts “rather than on the basis of what foreign papers write about the Hungarian government”, he said.

Szijjártó insisted Hungary’s economic and political positions were “extremely strong” outside Europe. He said the government had “never discriminated between investors” as long as they observed Hungarian laws. He mentioned as an example China’s Huawei “the presence of which company in Hungary was much criticised, but at the installation in Budapest of the 5G system operated by Vodafone, a non-eastern company, it turned out that the required infrastructure had been built by Huawei”.

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Referring to the war in Ukraine, Szijjártó said “the era of cheap Russian gas in Europe is clearly over”, with ties severed between Russia and the European Union “one after the other”, adding that “I am not sure this could be remedied in our lifetime”. He said it was important “to make clear that energy is a not a political or ideological issue, but a question of facts”, adding that safe supplies to Hungary could not be guaranteed without Russian sources.