Orbán: Hungary will not leave the EU but will try to reform it
15-11-2021
Central Europe
CNE.news
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, chairman of the ruling Hungarian Fidesz party, addresses the 29th congress of Fidesz in Budapest. Photo EPA, Szilard Koszticsak
Central Europe
Hungary will not leave the European Union but will continue to resist Brussels' attempts to erode the country's sovereignty. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said so on Sunday at the Fidesz congress, where he was re-elected as party leader. Next April, parliamentary elections will be held.
Orban was provoked to lease the European Union this summer by the Dutch Prime Minister Rutte because of the new legislation on sexual education. The Western European countries think that the hetero-normative approach in Hungary is discriminative against homosexuals and other sexual minorities.
But Orban is not impressed, he said on Sunday, according to reports. “After the communist bureaucracy, we do not want new dictates from Brussels now," Orbán told his cheering party colleagues. He added that Hungary does not like Western liberalism. "We are not giving up the right to protect our borders, to stop migrants. We maintain that marriage in Hungary is something between a man and a woman. The father is a man, and the mother is a woman. And they should leave our children alone.”
Germany
Orbán said that the EU must be reformed, and that Hungary's goal is to bring about that change and not to turn its back on the union, of which it has been a member since 2004. "We don't want to leave the EU at all. They are not getting rid of us that easily. We want to keep our sovereignty, and we don't want to find ourselves in the United States of Europe."
Orbán further wants the next German government to reduce Germany's influence on the EU. "I hope that the German government that is now forming wants more of a European Germany and not a German Europe where they (the Germans) tell the others what to do," Orbán said, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit.
"Reorganisation of the Right"
Orbán, at the head of Fidesz, has ruled Hungary almost without a break since 2010 with a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Parliamentary elections are due next spring. Until March of this year, Fidesz was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), to which the CDU and CSU also belong.
At the party conference, Orbán reiterated his support for a "reorganisation of the right" in Europe, as Jaroslaw Kaczyński of Poland's ruling national-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) demands.
Fidesz' EPP resignation came after the differences between Orbán and the German Union parties on the issue of democracy and the rule of law came to a head. The EU had already initiated several proceedings against Hungary for violations of the rule of law.
