The 2026 election victory of Hungary’s Fidesz-Christian Democrats “will not only be for the Hungarian people but a victory for Europe as a whole”, the EU affairs minister said at an event on Saturday.

Speaking at the Tranzit festival in Tihany, János Bóka said in a speech entitled “The age of patriots – disputes between Hungary and the Brussels Bureaucracy” that the “age of patriots” was not “a plan or desire, but the present, and we will occupy Brussels”.

The Fidesz-led government wanted a “strong and successful Europe, with strong and successful nations”, not one that acted against nations. “We have plans for Europe and the European Union,” he declared.

For the conservative community, “the nation is a value, so being Hungarian is also a value,” Bóka said, adding that a sovereign Hungary was “the guarantee of the existence and survival of the Hungarian people”. The 2026 election would decide whether Hungary “has a national sovereignist government or a puppet government sent from Brussels”.

Bóka said no alternative to Hungary’s EU membership existed, but there were two basic ways to assert Hungarian strategic interests on the one hand involving security cooperation that underwrote Hungary’s security and a single European market on the other, which provided foreign capital and technology and “full and unconditional access to the single market”.

Yet today, “the sick man of Europe is the European Union”, he said, adding that member states were “suffering because of the EU’s sickness”. Germany, France and Italy, the EU’s three biggest economies, were in crisis, he said.

“The century of Europe’s humiliation has begun,” Bóka said, citing a lack of competitiveness and strategic autonomy, as well as “the complete and irreversible transformation of the structure of European societies” resulting from the migration crisis, the Covid pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the economic fallout of the latter two.

The government, he said, was working to change Europe, but he also lamented that a sovereign member state had to spend much of its resources on “dealing with flawed EU decisions and protecting its citizens from their impact”. It was “scandalous”, he added, that a national government was forced to spend money on fighting “puppets from Brussels” during an election period.

Bóka vowed that Hungary’s government would act as a “catalyst” of change, “and whoever works against [the government] works against change; and without change, Europe is over”. He said not everyone agreed with the government, but the benefits of its policy would be enjoyed by those who did not vote for it, while Brussels plans “would even hit those who support it”.

Regarding the war in Ukraine, Bóka said the EU regarded it as “its own war”, believing that Ukrainian EU membership would strengthen the security of the continent. But the EU would not be able to bring peace to Ukraine, he said. Instead, it would “bring war to Europe,” Bóka declared.

Read more Fidesz-related news on Daily News Hungary.

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