On 2022-07-23, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbánspoke at the Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp and provided a tour d’horizon of the present situation and the challenges facing the West. He identified the following challenges which, in his opinion, Hungary and other Eastern European countries are facing directly while what he calls the “post-West” are ignoring or actively making worse.
Demography
Migration and preservation of ethnic identity
Gender and protection of the family
Deterring Russian aggression against NATO without war
Energy security
Economic instability and the southern Europe debt crisis
Orbán is among the most reviled heads of government among the ruling class in Brussels and Washington. Perhaps it’s because he forthrightly addresses problems they’d rather ignore and proposes paths forward that might actually work.
The first and most important challenge, Dear Friends, continues to be population, or demography. The fact is that there are still far more funerals than baptisms. Whether we like it or not, the peoples of the world can be divided into two groups: those that are capable of biologically maintaining their numbers; and those that are not, which is the group that we belong to. Our situation has improved, but there has not been a turnaround. This is the alpha and omega of everything: if there is no turnaround, sooner or later we will be displaced from Hungary, and we will be displaced from the Carpathian Basin.
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Migration has split Europe in two – or I could say that it has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples. I could also say that it is no longer the Western world, but the post-Western world. And around 2050, the laws of mathematics will lead to the final demographic shift: cities in this part of the continent – or that part – will see the proportion of residents of non-European origin rising to over 50 per cent of the total. And here we are in Central Europe – in the other half of Europe, or of the West. If it were not somewhat confusing, I could say that the West – let’s say the West in its spiritual sense – has moved to Central Europe: the West is here, and what is left over there is merely the post-West. A battle is in progress between the two halves of Europe. We made an offer to the post-Westerners which was based on tolerance or leaving one another in peace, allowing each to decide for themselves whom they want to live alongside; but they reject this and are continuing to fight against Central Europe, with the goal of making us like them. I shall leave to one side the moral commentary they attach to this – after all, this is such a lovely morning. There is now less talk about migration, but, believe me, nothing has changed: Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us.
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Demography, migration, and the next layer is gender – and what we call the Child Protection Act. … Here too, our position is simple. We are asking for another offer of tolerance: we do not want to tell them how they should live; we are just asking them to accept that in our country a father is a man and a mother is a woman, and that they leave our children alone. And we ask them to see to it that George Soros’s army also accepts this. It is important for people in the West to understand that in Hungary and in this part of the world this is not an ideological question, but quite simply the most important question in life. In this corner of the world there will never be a majority in favour of the Western lunacy – my apologies to everyone – that is being played out over there. Quite simply, Hungarians – or the sons of some other peoples – cannot get their heads around this. There are all these gender things: transnational and transgender; but the furthest we can go with that is to say “Transylvania” – although in Hungarian that is called “Erdély”. We cannot go any further than that.
Thank you for linking to this, Mr. W. Definitely worth taking the time to read all that Mr. Orban has to say on his layer-cake of topics.
One side comment that particularly caught my attention was Orban’s statement: “Yesterday I listened to the head of the RMDSZ [Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania], and I learned how this is being done here in Romania …” It is a real reminder that European borders have always been in flux; today’s borders are the consequences of past battles, past elite marriages, and past religious differences; and those artificial borders don’t match cultural & linguistic borders. All in all, it is a recipe for continuing friction within the European part of the Eurasian continent.
The sooner that NATO is terminated and North America leaves Europeans to sort out their own differences, the better the world will be!
In his speech soon after the Ukraine incursion, Putin, as I recall, mentioned that the West is free to do whatever crazy stuff it wants, but that Russia was not going down that road. Whether you agree with it or not, that speech was one of the few coherent statements heard since on the context of the Russia/Ukraine situation. I suspect Russians are in far more agreement with Orbán - surely more so than with Washington apparatchicks.
I have to say that this war would never have broken out if we had been a little luckier and at this crucial hour the President of the United States of America was called Donald Trump, and if before that we had managed to persuade Angela Merkel not to leave office: if Donald Trump had been the President of the USA and Angela Merkel the Chancellor of Germany. But we were not lucky, and so now we are in this war.
He is super based especially in comparison with his peer group in the EU. The English translation is nicely edited and reads well. I don’t speak Hungarian so I can’t tell if the actual speech carries the same kind of cadence and calm exposition.
[…] the most important horizon and time limit for our thinking is around 2030. Our analyses suggest that this is when the problems of the Western world will accumulate and multiply in terms of tension. There will be a very serious crisis in the United States. I have just recommended a French author [Camp of Saints], and I would also recommend to everyone a book by the American analyst George Friedman, also published in Hungarian, entitled “The Storm before the Calm”. In it he outlines the various challenges that the US will have to face, which will peak around 2030.
We are a transit country, and we want to remain a transit economy. At this point I must note that if the world separates into blocs and is once again split into East and West, we will not be a meeting point or a transit country. If power blocs emerge we will not be a meeting point, a gateway, a contact point combining the advantages of both the East and the West, but we will be on the edge of something, on the periphery. And then Hungary will not be a prosperous Hungary, but a dusty outpost garrison of the sort we read about in the work of [the comic novelist] Jenő Rejtő. We must therefore oppose the formation of any such blocs. This is the only way in which a transit country and a transit economy can be profitable.
On leadership transition, he is not shy to push back on the Western model of progressively older leaders that continue to seek office because that’s what they always do.
I am moving towards the exit. We need to ensure that the generation following us will have leadership of the same national and emotional commitment that we have given to Hungary. This is why we have quietly implemented a generational change, the symbol of which is that a 44-year-old mother of three is our President of the Republic, in contrast to or alongside a Prime Minister like me, who will soon be in his sixties. And if you look at the Government, you see ministers in their forties – sometimes their early forties – who will be able to provide leadership for Hungary for twenty or thirty years. Of course generational change is never easy, because there is a difference between newcomers who kick over the traces and those who pull the cart. Those who kick over the traces should be given the chance to perform in a circus tent, while those who pull the cart should be involved in political decision-making.