PM Orbán praised Hungary’s Turkic friends for low energy prices, called Azerbaijan a staunch partner

Hungary’s energy supply is secure thanks to Turkic countries, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said after meeting Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at his office in Budapest on Tuesday.

At a joint press conference with Aliyev, Orbán said households would pay 2-3 times the price of energy if it were not for “our Turkic friends”, noting that the first shipment of natural gas from Azerbaijan arrived in Hungary last year and the country would import similar volumes this year too.

Orbán said Azerbaijan had always been a staunch partner, no matter what difficulties Hungary had faced in recent decades. The prime minister said that at a time when global security “is being tested by challenges”, the value of “reliable partners” meeting to review bilateral ties and assess the international situation should not be underestimated.

For the first time in the history of the Organisation of Turkic States, Hungary is hosting one of its summits, Orbán noted. He said the war in Hungary’s neighbourhood and the related sanctions had cost the economy more than 20 billion euros so far. He said that instead of isolating the conflict, the European Union had chosen to expand it and had backed war over peace, “and this has caused a lot of damage.”

EU economy struggling due to war and sanctions

“The European economy is also in a difficult situation because the war and the sanctions have destroyed the strategic foundations of what had been successful economic growth,” Orbán said, adding that “the ship of the European economy has to be navigated without a compass”, which had led to a continuous energy crisis.

Europeans, he said, were paying 3-4 times as much as Americans for gas and electricity, which had made it impossible to build a competitive economy.

Meanwhile, he said Hungary had fought to be able to maintain energy relations with Russia, to which the Ukrainians had responded by “turning off the Ukrainian pipeline”. “It was after this that we made an agreement with our Turkic friends on supplying Hungary from the south,” he noted.

Hungarian MVM and MOL present in Azerbaijan

The prime minister said Hungary appreciated that Azerbaijan has enabled Hungarian state-owned energy group MVM and oil and gas company MOL to acquire shares in its gas fields and pipelines. Hungary’s stake in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas fields ensures that it has hundreds of millions of cubic metres of gas and hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a year on the international energy market, he added.

• Azerbaijani-Hungarian friendship – Hungarian MOL bought oil fields and pipelines

Hungary and Azerbaijan have also agreed to expand their cooperation to the area of renewable energy, Orbán said. He said his talks with Aliyev had also covered economic matters and the issue of peace, adding that they had always agreed that the war could only be resolved through negotiations.

Orbán congratulated Aliyev on finalising the text of an Azeri-Armenian peace agreement. He said the agreement was a good example of how a war could be resolved through diplomacy, adding that when it came to peace, every bit of success was “hugely important” for Hungary in today’s “turbulent” international situation.