He said Hungary had a responsibility “to explain to our ‘American friends’ that defeating an upcoming economic superpower, China, in a war is not a good idea.”

“The third world war depends only on the United States”, Orbán said, while Europe and Hungary want a “new deal”, he said. Medium-sized powers and regional medium-sized powers, which status Hungary aspires for, will have a huge role in the “realignment of the new world order”, Orbán said.

Hungary could be a figurehead of peaceful coexistence and trade between the East and the West, he said. Hungary, as part of the western world, must “show the decent approach to change”, he said.

Hungary’s strategy to “grow through connections” is the only way ahead, and one that “Europe unfortunately isn’t following”.

Gulyás Calls for 'No War, No Gender, No Migration' 
 
Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, highlighted the idea behind the motto “no war, no gender, no migration” as the top issue in next year’s European Parliamentary elections, in a debate with Péter Márki-Zay, leader of the Everybody’s Hungary Movement, at the Tranzit Festival in Tihany.

Gulyás insisted that “rejecting gender ideology, issues around peace, stopping migration and the problem of corruption are the greatest challenges for the European Parliament”.

He also suggested that the EP was “doing everything to leave no room for Christian thought in Europe”.

He said the EP was “at the forefront of European institutions promoting migration”, adding that “if Europe wants to retain the achievements of Schengen, it must protect its external borders”.

Márki-Zay said his movement was committed to Christian-Conservative values, adding that they would run in the EP elections on their own, with aspirations to become a member of the European People’s Party.

Kövér: Western States Trying to 'Reload Communism'
 
Western states are currently attempting to “reload communism”, Speaker of Parliament László Kövér said at the Tranzit festival in Tihany, in western Hungary. Hungary “already tried [communism], and we’d like to stay out of it this time,” he added.

“World-changing ideas often break to the surface, but the method’s always the same and brings with it the pre-eminence of ‘me'”, Kövér said. The approach of young liberal leaders shows a “striking resemblance” to the erstwhile Communist leaders of Hungary, he said.

Kövér said the most important task was to protect young people from the “trap of far-left ideas, manifesting in gender ideology and wokeism, among others.”

That task requires strong families capable of protecting children, and an education system willing to step in and impart values and ways to live as a community if the families are weak, he said.

Mária Schmidt, the director of the House of Terror Museum, said communist ideology had strengthened in the West after the 1990s, “giving rise to the LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter movements, which are just as aggressive as cancel culture, a mirror image of the Chinese cultural revolution,” she said.

At another discussion at the festival, Fidesz MEP Balázs Hidvéghi called for a return to the original values of the EU.

“The question is whether the EU can return to its earlier, effective functions while respecting the sovereignty of its member states, its founding principles and its own regulations, or whether it continues to move towards even more doctrinaire, narrow, aggressive policies which weaken its global roles and risk its partnerships,” he said.

Orbán: Opposition Amateurs

Concerning the difference between Fidesz and the opposition, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán compared professional football to amateur soccer.

“Amateurs run to where they see the ball, while professionals run to where the ball will be,” he said at the Tranzit Festival in Tihany, adding that the ruling Fidesz party had a strategy “for the short, medium, and long term”, while the opposition parties were absorbed in “picking an issue and creating a scandal”.

He said international financiers looked for agents to promote their agendas and had found those agents “within Hungary’s left.” He likened them to Goliath, “and we are David”.

Meanwhile, Orbán said young people should decide whether they have a homeland “or whether they just want to have a good time in the world…”

They should ask themselves whether they have obligations or obligations arising from that identity. Once those questions are answered, they would “have both feet on the ground, and can start collecting similar people around them to build a large national army in a spiritual and political sense.”

The prime minister said Hungarians’ duty was to “cultivate their land” in the Carpathian Basin.

Asked to compare the communists of the past and the current Western mainstream, the prime minister said the worlds of liberals and communists were “very far apart at first glance”. But after the fall of a communist regime, most communists had become liberals.

He said the right-wing, conservative worldview hued to the idea of happiness, but “there are some things in the world that are more important than ourselves”, he said.

These, he said, included the family, the homeland and God “and our relationship with him”. “If these things are more important than myself, then an answer must be found as to how to serve these,” Orbán said.

“This results in different kinds of politics”. This dividing line is not ideological, political or anthropological in nature, Orbán said.

He identified two political schools on the conservative side. One of them, he said, organised thought about things more important than the individual along the lines of rational answers.

The other, the Christian Democratic school, says there are sacred things “that life or enemies want to turn profane, and this must be prevented”.

Orbán said the answers to the questions of human existence and political questions converged both on the right and the left.

He noted that liberals in 1990 “quickly took over every institution” and worked out the linguistic framework “for describing what is happening in a way that is favourable to them”.

That was when they came up with the idea that democracy must be liberal, he said, adding that whereas other types of democracies had existed in the past, “this is now prohibited; there is only liberal democracy now”.

Liberals, he said, had achieved a hegemonic position in the use of the means needed to shape public discourse, language and thought. And conservatives were happy to finally see the end of communism, but before they knew it “the other side had long organised itself both internationally and domestically”.

Conservatives, he said, were still lagging behind by about ten years.

Meanwhile, the prime minister said Europe was currently witnessing a battle between the concept of the nation state and the imperium, “and for us Hungarians the chance for a good life lies in the Europe of sovereign states.”

Because the Roman Empire was brought down not by another empire but by different tribes, Europe, too, is made up of nations, but it always carried with it the memory of the Roman Empire and the desire for cooperation, the prime minister said.

Whereas Hungarians value the existence of nation states, the left desired “an imperial order”, he said. Both ideas were European traditions, he said, and as long as they were in balance, “the European machine functions quite well”.

Orbán said that when the United Kingdom had been part of the EU, it and the central European nation states had represented the nation-state concept with roughly equal weight to the French-German axis’s representation of “the imperial concept”.

The UK’s departure from the bloc was followed by the appearance of “those things that are cleverly packaged in the Anglo-Saxon way, presented as being good” and wrapped in the garb of European unity, but in fact are constantly taking the important elements of the sovereignty of nation states, he added.

“We must fight against this and if we can’t protect ourselves within the European institutions, there will be trouble,” Orbán said.

At stake in next year’s European Parliamentary elections was “moving the scene of the fight to Brussels”, he added.

Orbán said the biggest European right-wing alliance was not fulfilling its mission to fight “empire-building” and stand up for nation states and national independence. Instead of offering Europeans an alternative, it constantly cooperated and entered into coalitions with the left, borrowing and approving issues and language defined by the left.

“That’s why we have to try to get the moderate right to stand up for its own interests instead of seeking cooperation with the left.”

The right, he added, was not without its faults, “but we must work together”. At stake in next year’s European Parliamentary elections was whether this right-wing unity would become a reality and win a majority against the left, he added.

Asked about the war in Ukraine, Orbán said ending the bloodshed could not begin by drafting a peace plan, as the liberal community proposed. It must begin with a ceasefire, after which there would be time to draw up a peace plan, he said.

Rather than being “globalised”, the war should have been localised, but Hungary alone represented this position, he said.

The West’s strategy of having the Ukrainians fight and give their lives while supplying “money, information and weapons” was not working.

This strategy was not sufficient to defeat Russia, he said.