Hungary‘s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Wednesday likened the European Union to the former Soviet Union and called on Hungarians to “resist” Brussels as they did Moscow in 1956.
Orban, who is closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin than any other European leader, drew the comparison in a speech marking the 1956 Hungarian Uprising against Soviet occupation, which was brutally put down by Russian troops.
Around 3,000 people were killed and 20,000 injured.
Hungary: What did Viktor Orban say about the EU?
“For us, the lesson of 1956 is that we must fight for only one thing: for Hungary and for Hungarian freedom,” he told thousands of people at a rally in Budapest.
“Do we bow to the will of a foreign power, this time from Brussels, or do we resist it? I propose that our response should be as clear and unequivocal as it was in 1956.”
Hungary currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, giving Orban a prominent platform to criticize the bloc, which his country joined in 2004, over its continued support for Ukraine, a former Soviet republic also fighting Russian aggression.
“The Brussels bureaucrats have led the West into a hopeless war,” said Orban. “In their minds, dizzy with the hope of victory, this is the war of the West against Russia. Now they want to openly push the entire European Union into the war in Ukraine.”
He then claimed, without providing any evidence, that the EU was planning to have Ukrainian troops stationed in Hungary in the event of victory to help safeguard European security.
“We Hungarians would wake up one morning to find that Slavic soldiers from the east were again stationed on the territory of Hungary,” he postulated.
“We know that they want to force us into war, we know they want to force their migrants on us, we know they want to hand our children over to gender activists,” he continuing, moving onto another of his problems with the EU: the bloc’s immigration and equality and diversity policies.
“Independent Hungarian politics are unacceptable to Brussels. That is why they announced that they will get rid of Hungary’s national government. They also announced that they wanted to hang a Brussels puppet government around the country’s neck.”
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Orban provided no evidence for these claims either, but his comments came against the background of an economic downturn and series of political scandals which have seen a rise in support for a new rival party.
The Tisza party, led by former-government-insider-turned opposition leader Peter Magyar, has accused Orban of corruption and propaganda and is currently polling neck-and-neck with the prime minister’s Fidesz party.
“Hungarians have sent a message: Viktor Orban’s regime is finished,” said Magyar, a media-savvy 43-year-old, after the publication of the latest polls this week.
Magyar has also seized on remarks by an Orban advisor who claimed last month that Hungary, faced with invasion, would not have defended itself like Ukraine has done, since the crushing of the 1956 uprising taught it to be “cautious.”
The remarks caused outrage in Hungary and Orban called them a “mistake.” The official has apologized but resisted calls to resign.
The 1956 uprising is “a cornerstone of national identity… and has an identity-building power for Hungarians, including pro-government voters,” Zoltan Ranschburg, a senior political analyst at the liberal-leaning Republikon Institute in Budapest, explained to the AFP news agency.
But the added that the aid’s remarks revealed a “contradiction” in the Orban’s messaging, which “simultaneously praises patriotism and national sovereignty while condemning the Ukrainian president for defending his own country.”
mf/lo (AFP, AP, Reuters)