Orbán: Europe will be left alone to handle the war if it does not come to its senses

Europe will be left alone to handle the war in Ukraine if it does not ditch its pro-war stance, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in his address at the Balvanyos Summer University in Baile Tusnad, Romania, on Saturday, adding that the “pro-peace position” was “fermenting”.

The prime minister said changes in the global system were under way and Asia would be at its centre, so a “Hungarian grand strategy” was both needed and in the pipeline.

Noting his recent meeting with Romanian counterpart Marcel Ciolacu in Bucharest, Orban said: “We are making progress.” Romania is Hungary’s third most important economic partner, with economic and trade relations breaking new records, he added.

He said Hungary’s EU presidency will put the issue of Romania’s accession to Schengen on the agenda in October.

The two leaders also discussed the Bucharest-Budapest high-speed rail link, Orban noted.

The prime minister said that this year the Romanians had not tried to dictate what could be discussed at Tusvanyos. He added that many people in Brussels, however, had condemned Hungary’s peace mission, even though the bloc’s founding treaty stated that “the Union’s aim is to promote peace”.

Orban said: “Time is on the side of the politics of peace.”

Referring to the upcoming US presidential election, he declared: “Trump ante portas.” If Europe did not shift to a “peace policy” by the time of the November election, it would have to do so after Trump’s victory, “admitting defeat” and bearing the political consequences alone, he said.

He said Brussels “doesn’t like it when we call what they do a pro-war policy, because they think they’re supporting the war in the interest of peace.”

He added that since the start of the Hungarian “peace mission”, the US secretary of state had spoken with Russia’s foreign minister, and the Swiss foreign minister had also held talks with him.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he noted, had called Donald Trump, the former US president and Republican presidential candidate, and the Ukrainian foreign minister had visited Beijing.

“Albeit slowly, we’re moving away from a European pro-war policy in the direction of a pro-peace policy,” Orban said. “In other words, the fermentation has begun.”

If it were up to Ukraine and Russia, there would never be peace, so peace can only come from the outside, Orban said.

Both sides, he added, were taking “brutal” losses, “yet neither wants to reach a settlement”, Orban said, explaining that this was because both Ukraine and Russia believed that they could win and were fuelled by their own “perceived or real truth”.

Orban said the Ukrainians saw the war as a Russian invasion that violated international law and their territorial sovereignty, and that they were defending themselves and fighting a war of independence.

The Russians, on the other hand, believed that there had been “serious NATO military developments in Ukraine”, that the country had been promised NATO membership, and they did not want to see either NATO troops or the alliance’s weapons on the Russia-Ukraine border, he said. Russia therefore believed it had a right to self-defence and that the war had been provoked.

“So everyone has some kind of perceived or real truth, and neither side will give up the war,” the prime minister said.

“This is a straight path to escalation,” he said, stressing that there would be no peace if it were left up to the two warring sides. “Peace can only come from the outside,” Orban said.

Ruthless war provided a vantage point on “true reality”, he said. The true reality, he declared, cast a cold light on “ideologies, statistical manipulations, media distortions and tactical eavesdropping by politicians losing their power, their delusions and conspiracy theories”, which no longer had relevance. “What remains is the dust of brutal reality.”

He said that while in recent years the US had declared China to be its main challenger and opponent, “we’re still seeing that it’s fighting a proxy war against Russia and constantly accusing China of covertly supporting Russia.”

“If that’s true, then it begs the question as to why it’s rational to put two such large countries in the same enemy camp,” he said.

Orban also emphasised Ukraine’s defiance of expectations in terms of its reslilence, which he attributed to Ukraine getting “a flash of the perspective of belonging to the West” instead of being a buffer state.

Meanwhile, the prime minister said Russia “isn’t the firm neo-Stalinist autacracy the Brussels leaders trying to bring it to its knees with sanctions are trying to make it out to be, either”. Rather, he said, it was a country that was showing technical and economic, “and eventually, perhaps, social” flexibility.

Orban said European politics “has collapsed”, arguing that Europe had relinquished the protection of its own interests.

“Europe is currently following the politics of the US Democratic Party unconditionally, even at the cost of self-destruction,” he said, adding that sanctions imposed on Russia were hurting European interests, raising energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive.

Orban said the European system of powers had so far been based on a “Paris-Berlin axis”, but this no longer existed, or had at least “become irrelevant and evadable” compared with the “new power centre” comprising London, Warsaw, Kyiv and the Baltic and Scandinavian states.

He said the idea of replacing the Paris-Berlin axis was not a new one but rather “an old Polish plan” that involved Poland becoming the continent’s main American base. This, he added, required “calling the Americans in there, between the Germans and the Russians”. But this, he added, could only be made a reality owing to the current war.

“This is an old plan: weaken Russia and surpass Germany,” Orban said, insisting that Poland was pursuing the “most deceitful politics” in Europe, arguing that “they’re obliviously doing business with the Russians while morally lecturing us for doing the same thing”.

He said Poland had abandoned the Visegrad cooperation in order to pursue this strategy as the V4, besides accepting the Paris-Berlin axis, acknowledged that “Germany is strong, Russia is strong, and between the two, in cooperation with the central European states, we form a third component”.

Orban also noted that Poland’s army is the second largest in Europe after France, with the country spending 5 percent of its GDP on defence.

The prime minister said Hungary’s “peace mission”, besides aiming for peace, was also about urging Europe to “finally pursue a policy of its own”.

Orban said the West had drifted into “intellectual loneliness”, arguing that until now it had seen itself as a point of reference, or a global standard, because it had been the one to contribute the values such as liberal democracy and the green transition, which the world had to accept.

“But this situation has taken a 180-degree turn over the last two years” Orban said, arguing that although the West had once again told the world to take a more determined stance against Russia, the reality was that “slowly everyone is supporting Russia”.

He said it was unsurprising that countries like North Korea and China were backing Russia, but Iran, India and even NATO-member Turkiye had joined them, and the Muslim world also saw Russia as a partner.

Orban said the biggest problem in the world was “the weakness and disintegration of the West”, as well as the Western media narrative that Russia was the biggest danger for the world.

“This is a mistake,” he said, arguing that Russia’s leadership was “hyper-rational, comprehendible and predictable”, unlike the West’s “irrational and unpredictable” actions.

He said Hungary’s task was to try to understand the West again. Central Europe’s worldview lay in the idea of nation states, while the West “believes that they no longer exist”, he added.

Also, the West, he said, thought differently about issues such as migration. While hundreds of thousands of Christians were killing each other in Europe’s east, hundreds of thousands of people from “foreign civilisations” were being allowed into the western parts of the continent.

He said the EU “not only thinks this way, but also declares it”, and their objective was to “transcend nations” and transpose their sovereignty to Brussels.

A similar battle was taking place in the United States, he said, so the stakes in the US presidential election “are enormous”.

Orban said Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, wanted to bring the American people back from the “post-national liberal condition” to the “national condition”.

Opposition to this endeavour was behind moves to thwart Trump’s candidacy, he said.

“This is why they want to put him in prison, why they’re stripping him of his wealth, and if that doesn’t work, this is why they wanted to kill him,” Orban said.

Orban said the “dramatic, democracy-shaking” political consequence of the post-national condition was the political problem of elitism and populism.

He said the elites “condemn the people for drifting towards the right” and labelled the people’s feelings and thoughts “xenophobic, homophobic and nationalistic”. Meanwhile, “the people”, he said, suspected the elite of “sinking into some mindless globalism” instead of caring about what mattered to them.