The EU leadership should “start trembling,” Viktor Orban tells crowd at event commemorating national revolution
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that he and his supporters are ready to march on Brussels to defend their country’s sovereignty within the EU.
Orban gave the warning on Friday in a fiery speech dedicated to an anniversary of Hungary’s unsuccessful revolution of 1848 against the rule of the Austrian Empire. “Brussels is not the first empire that has set its eyes on Hungary,” he stressed.
The conservative prime minister told a crowd of around a thousand of his supporters that he’s ready to do everything to protect Hungary from what he described as attempts by the EU to “force” the country into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, to make it accept migrants, and to “re-educate” its children by imposing an LGBTQ agenda on them.
Powers in the Western world, of which the EU is a part, “start wars, destroy worlds, redraw countries’ borders and graze on everything like locusts,” Orban told his audience. “We Hungarians live differently and want to live differently,” he pointed out.
“If we want to defend Hungary’s freedom and sovereignty, we have no other choice but to occupy Brussels,” the PM said. “We will march all the way to Brussels, and will orchestrate change in the EU ourselves.”
Orban stressed that he and his supporters are experienced people who know what needs to be done in order to properly restructure the bloc, of which Hungary has been a member since 2004. It’s time for the EU leadership to “start trembling,” he said.
In power for 14 years now, Orban is being criticized by Brussels over allegedly undermining the rule of law, infringing on press freedoms and clamping down on gay rights. The EU has been withholding funds from Hungary for years over these and other issues.
Brussels is also unhappy about the stance taken by Budapest on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a neighbor to which it has refused to provide arms, unlike other fellow EU member states, while at the same time maintaining economic and political ties with Moscow. Orban insists that there’s no military solution to the crisis and that it should be settled through diplomacy.
During his speech, he reiterated that “Hungary can only benefit from peace, we do not want war.” However, Brussels has brought the conflict to its doors, he said, referring to the ongoing fighting. “We have been deceived, it is time to rise up,” he stated.
