INTERVIEW – Orbán: Europe at decisive turn, humanity entering a new era

Budapest (MTI) – Europe is going through a decisive turn and humanity is entering a new era involving slower and more difficult processes instead of the turning points of the past, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview with the Magyar Kurír Catholic news portal late on Saturday.

Economic tasks include maintaining competitiveness. The main question in professional preparedness is how an old type of approach could be replaced by contemporary knowledge based digital technology. Regarding social trends, he said it is necessary to tackle the issue of “whether we can reverse the demographic decline” or not.

Additional questions Orbán raised include whether religious communities can be saved or “individualism will spread everywhere” and what effects artificial intelligence experiments would have.

“These questions will be decided within our lives,” Orbán said.

Hungary has a political culture that allows open and sincere dialogue about every important issue. “Unfortunately, this is not the case anymore in some parts of Europe,” he added.

In response to a question about the deputy state secretary’s office set up in the Human Resources Ministry, he said Hungary will break with the former approach according to which any document prepared in Europe should only include ideologically neutral statements about people persecuted for their religion.