“We thought the nation has sovereignty, it is ours, and everyone will serve that at home and respect it from the outside,” he added.

“The world around us is not interested in Hungary remaining a sovereign country … they will be better off if we partially or fully lose our sovereignty,” he said, adding that even some Hungarians thought that way.

Hungary, he said, could not be sovereign as long as public thinking was dominated by “a liberal hegemony”.

“This does not mean that we should eliminate what belongs to our adversaries … what we want is pluralism in Hungary,” he said. “In the West, they have not understood this; public thinking there is unable to step out of the liberal framework,” he added.

The Hungarian political system stands closer to a democratic way of thinking than the western European does, he said. “Liberals do not care about the people; their thinking focuses on an ideology and not the community of people,” he added. Orbán said Hungary’s international influence was “greater than its real weight” because “Europeans can now express their opinion via Hungary rather than their own publicity”.

“It is high time the West learnt that you cannot live in lies because it will make you sick and destroy you,” he said. Meanwhile, he said “lost sovereignty was in the focus of the last century”, while Hungary’s sovereignty was regained at the end of the century and “this decade is about retaining that sovereignty”.

Hungary continues to rely on Századvég’s help, “especially the young generation”, Orbán said. “We regained sovereignty and now it is up to young people to retain it.”

Orbán: Hungary 'Voice of Europeans'

"Hungary today is the voice of the people of Europe," Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told a conference organised by the Századvég Foundation.

“Hungary is the only country that speaks the thoughts of Hungarians and western Europeans,” he told the conference on sovereignty. “The time has come for change in Europe and for Europeans to take back European institutions.”

Concerning the history of Századvég, Orbán said the institute was founded 30 years ago, “but the concept had been born much earlier, in the mid-1980s, when Századvég, a periodical, was issued,” noting his own participation. “This generation decided not to pretend anymore” and expressed its hatred of communism, he added.

“We wanted the communists to fail and the Soviets to pull out of Hungary … and a periodical seemed to be a good idea, as free life begins with free speech and free speech starts with free writing,” he said.

“Freedom will bring further freedoms and create free people; that was the philosophy of Századvég.” He said his generation had been “the most inexperienced and the most radical” of all other opposition movements. The foundation of Századvég was “a story of the heart and the love for the homeland”, he said.

Orbán: Századvég 'Intellectual Workshop'

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said the Századvég Institute was needed as an “intellectual workshop, a civic research centre that supports us”. It was clear for everyone in 1993 that “Fidesz exists and will exist”, but the return of the communists then posed a serious intellectual challenge.

“The real twist in the entire story, which also made our lives intellectually more difficult, was that the door where they entered had been opened by freedom-loving liberals,” he added.

“Nobody is surprised about that here now because it is natural in western Europe that the liberals are the new communists,” but in 1993-94 it caused “a moral shock” that shook the entire Hungarian political system because “decent people at that time found this odd, to say the least”.

“As a result, we had to get strong and there had to be an intellectual workshop, which is why Századvég was created 30 years ago,” he said.

Orbán suggested that back then, they had been on the same side with US financier George Soros, because “he also did not want Hungary to be ruled by communists, and supported anti-communist activities”. “It was not yet clear that he wanted to be the one to rule central Europe instead of the communists and Soviets … we could not be aware of that,” Orbán said.

“Now he no longer conceals his plans … he crashed the British pound, he is flooding Europe with migrants, he will openly say that national borders should be abolished and Europe’s countries stripped of their sovereignty,” he added.

Kocsis: Protecting Sovereignty 'Constitutional Obligation'

“Protecting Hungary’s sovereignty is our constitutional obligation, under which we must face any debate,” Máté Kocsis, the group leader of ruling Fidesz, told a conference.

Kocsis called for setting up an institution to protect the country’s sovereignty “to monitor trends indicating foreign interference”. To stop such interference, the election law should be changed “to make it clear that the same rules apply to all civil organisations and their candidates, as to the political parties” he said.

Financing and accounting for their spending must be the same whether it comes to civil groups or political parties, he said.

Foreign funds in Hungarian politics have been increasingly present since Hungary joined the European Union and simultaneously with political globalisation, Kocsis said, but “there have been no earlier examples of foreign funds financing [leftist] political campaigns” in the country, he insisted.

He called for changing the penal code to criminalise accepting foreign funds as a member or candidate of an organisation participating in an election, and to penalise such activities with up to three years imprisonment.

According to Kocsis, “there is a fundamental difference between the concept of democracy in the West and in Hungary … they say things will often change and we say the will of the people must be promoted at all times.”

While “in the West it is not democratic if voters support the same government for the fourth time … they say steadiness is dictatorship and versatility is democracy.” “They have a fundamental problem with a country in which elections are won on the basis of national values and sovereignty”.

Parliament EU Affairs CTTEE Head: 2024 Year of Protecting Sovereignty

The year 2024 will be dedicated to protecting sovereignty, with “great battles to be fought in the spring”, the head of parliament’s European Affairs committee said.

Judit Varga told a conference organised by the Századvég Institute dubbed Sovereignty that borders must be defined between states as well as between states and international organisations in terms of self-governance and freedom. In certain matters, such as migration, marriage and family, nobody should decide on behalf of Hungarians, she said.

“Yet, in Brussels they want to make decisions on Hungarians’ behalf in these and some more serious issues, such as war and peace,” she added. “Instead of observing the treaties and laws, the EU defines the borders between EU competencies and member states’ powers on the basis of political tastes and preferences, in line with an arbitrary choice of values,” Varga said.

Hungary must fight for its sovereignty within the borders and outside the borders, she said. “Attacks by the servants of foreign interests must be fought back,” she added citing “pseudo-NGOs and rolling dollars being used to undermine Hungarians’ self-governance”.

Referring to the election results in Poland, she said “Poland has lost the ability to protect its sovereignty”.