This past year has been the year the European Union became isolated, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said at a parliamentary committee hearing on Monday, adding that Brussels’s frustrations with Hungary stemmed from the bloc “no longer being a player in global politics”.

The EU has no role in managing the conflicts taking place on the continent, Szijjártó told the foreign affairs committee, according to a ministry statement.

“Them being sidelined like this explains all the frustrations reflected in European remarks that show that they don’t know what to do about the leader of a central European country not asking western Europe for permission to pursue a foreign policy based on national interests,” Szijjártó said.

He said this was a consequence of Brussels’s “ideologised foreign policy built on illusions and political bias”. “The European Union today pursues a pro-war, pro-migration and pro-gender foreign policy strategy, and by doing so, it has completely isolated itself in global politics,” the minister said.

He said the politicians of the liberal mainstream had for years competed in “who can make the rudest remark about US President Donald Trump, so it’s no wonder that in the end the European Union could only stike an extremely unfavourable tariff deal with the United States.”

Meanwhile, Szijjártó said the EU had also grown more isolated from China. He said the European Commission had “crossed every line” by describing China as a “systemic rival”, arguing that the EU should instead follow Hungary’s example and pursue beneficial cooperation with China.

Szijjártó criticised the sanctions on Russia, saying they had eliminated the growth model based on the combination of advanced Western technology and cheap Eastern energy.

“Because the way I see it, Europeans having to pay two or three times what American economic players pay for gas is not the answer, and neither is European businesses paying four or five times what their Chinese peers pay for electricity,” he said.

“We have passed 19 sanctions packages in four years and the Russian economy still hasn’t been brought to its knees,” the minister said. “By contrast, we’ve caused a lot of serious problems for Europe with skyrocketing energy prices among other things.”

Szijjártó also criticised the EU for becoming isolated from several African and Asian countries by not having signed free trade and investment protection agreements with them. He said this was because the EU “regularly tries to force unrelated matters into these types of agreements”.

“What does Brussels’s gender ideology have to do with trade cooperation?” he said. “And it’s with these ideologised issues that they tend to thwart the signing of agreements that would be in the European Union’s interest.”

Meanwhile, he hailed US President Donald Trump’s peace plan as a “huge opportunity” to end the war in Ukraine. “We Hungarians are fully in support of this. But let’s not be naive. The Europeans will do everything they can to undermine this as well, just as they’ve undermined all of the peace efforts so far.”

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