“All we ask is that they do not try to force onto us the fate which we see as a nation’s doom,” he said. The prime minister said the “claim by the internationalist left” that Europe had always been home to mixed-race peoples was an illusion and a deliberate conflation of ideas.

The “mixed-race world” of Europeans and those coming to the continent from the outside cannot be compared to the intermixing of peoples living in Europe, he said.

“We in the Carpathian Basin, for example, aren’t mixed-race people, but simply a mix of the peoples living in their European homeland,” Orbán said.

“Hungarians don’t want to become mixed-race,” and future generations must be prepared to thwart the expansion of Islamic civilisation towards Europe not just from the south but from the west as well, Orbán said. At the same time, Hungary must be prepared to take in Christians fleeing the West, he added.

Orbán identified the issue of gender as another challenge facing Hungarians. This, he said, was an issue over which Hungary had been taken to court, but an agreement has been reached on keeping the matter separate from the debates on EU funds.

Orbán said the gender issue was one on which Hungary had once again “made an offer of tolerance”.

“We don’t want to tell others how they should live; we only ask that they accept that in our country the father is a man, the mother a woman, and we want them to leave our children alone and make [US financier] George Soros accept this as well,” Orbán said. He said the issues of demographics, migration and gender were a “historic battle between the right and left”, arguing that these would be the issues that shape the future.

He highlighted the importance of forming alliances to defend against these issues, adding that this was why the “post-Westerners” were doing everything they could to upset the unity of the Visegrad Group.

Orbán said the war had shaken the cooperation between Hungary and Poland in spite of the fact that the two countries shared the same strategic interests.

Poland, he said, wanted to ensure that Russia did not advance westward and that Ukraine remains a sovereign democratic state. But whereas Hungary wants to stay out of the war between the two Slavic peoples, “the Poles feel that this is their war”, Orbán said, adding that Hungary and Poland should save what they could from their strategic alliance for the post-war era.


MTI/ PM’s Press Office Photo: Vivien Cher Benko