By: V4 Agency
“The EP thinks it has more legitimacy than the national parliaments, which is completly false,” Hungary’s prime minister said. Viktor Orban also pointed out that nowadays Brussels is not much different from communist Moscow, which Hungarians know all too well.
The EPP must retain its Christian-conservative character, but the party family appears to be increasingly diluted, PM Viktor Orban told the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
Hungary’s premier pointed out that EPP group leader Manfred Weber intends to form the same coalition in Brussels as the one that already exists in Berlin, which would make it slowly impossible to distinguish between conservatives and socialists.
Mr Orban also mentioned that Hungarians had lost their trust in Weber a long time ago. Although the two politicians reached an agreement during Weber’s visit to Budapest in 2018 that the Hungarian government would support his re-election as EPP Group Chairman, Weber publicly declared that he did not wish to be elected with the support of Hungarians. “This was not about me, but about insulting the Hungarian people. We have lost confidence in him,” PM Orban said.
According to Mr Orban, it was the right decision by the German presidency to attach the EU’s budgetary mechanism to treaties, thus avoiding any political abuse, and to bound its application to judicial review. He mentioned that Hungarian citizens also agree with this, because “we know what it is like when decisions are not made in our own capital”.
At the same time, PM Orban made clear that the real debate was not about the mechanism, but about family policy, migration policy and cultural issues. He stressed that, according to the planned amendment, it could have been used with regards to any issue, for instance to force countries to take in refugees.
“We do not want migration,” Viktor Orban concluded, noting that they did not accept the arbitrary rule of law concept that the EP wanted to apply.