Orbán said it was a matter of satisfaction that cooperation between Hungary and Russia was “based on mutual respect, enabling the discussion of important issues, even amid the current difficult geopolitical situation”.

Orbán said Hungary stood on the side of peace, “and we are convinced that maintaining dialogue is an essential condition for establishing the quickest possible peace”.

He assured the Russian president of Hungary’s readiness to enhance cooperation with Russia in areas not restricted by international law, the statement said.

Meanwhile, Orbán Sees 'Good Chance' For Christian Forces to Become Dominant in EU

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a good chance for forces with a national conservative, sovereigntist and Christian basis to become dominant in the European Union,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at an award ceremony in Brussels.

“It is nations rather than the Soros empire or Brussels bureaucrats that will win the debate with liberals,” the prime minister said.

The ideology of an open society will not gain ground in central Europe, Orbán insisted. “We will relegate them where they belong, the garbage heap of history, just as we have expelled the communists.”

At the ceremony, the Hunyadi János Award of the For a Civic Hungary Foundation was given to Polish MEP Ryszard Antoni Legutko.

Referring to the Polish awardee, Orbán said Legutko had “studied the operations of the European Union and discovered critical signs of endeavours for political authoritarianism”.

“He established that progressive liberals have an adversarial attitude towards anybody else with a different way of thinking … they have become like the communists and pose a real danger to freedom, pursuing their own utopian nightmares,” Orbán said.

“Progressive liberals in the European Union are not interested in the European person … they only have an interest in their own ideology,” Orbán said.

“If promoting those ideas costs dismantling European industry and agriculture, they will do so… If it involves erasing Europe’s culture through illegal migration, they will also do that,” Orbán said.

“But we do not promote ideas but represent European people,” he added. Orbán said that at the time of Hungary’s accession to the European Union in 2004, “we felt that we had arrived and that we were home.”

“We thought that the EU was a guarantee of prosperity and our national independence,” he said.

But he said Legutko had recognised earlier that the representatives of liberalism strove to “eliminate sovereignty, take away as much of member states’ national competencies as possible”, and to control the bloc with “political diktats”.

“Those we are arguing with actually want to eliminate us,” he said.

After Brexit, the representation of sovereignty had been left to central Europe, the prime minister said, adding that the Poles and the Hungarians had always been in agreement when it came to the matter of sovereignty.

“For the first time in decades, I feel that the sovereigntist central Europeans are not alone,” Orbán said.

He said something was “astir” among German farmers, as well as in France and Portugal, while the “international conservative sovereigntist forces” had also become key players on the Netherlands’ political scene.

“Europe is showing signs of life; it’s defending and having its voice heard,” the prime minister said. Orbán said that after Legutko had discovered the “motifs of communism” in progressive liberalism, he “spoke about it openly”.

The prime minister praised Legutko for his courage to speak about the “autocratic tendencies that were inherent in liberalism” in the 1990s, thanking him for contributing to Hungarian freedom through his work.

Orbán: Nuclear Capacity to Expand from 2030s

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told the Nuclear Energy Summit 2024 that new 2,400 megawatt capacity “will be connected to the grid” at the start of the next decade.

“This will enable us to avoid imports of 3.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas every year, and our annual CO2 emission will be decreased by 17 million tonnes, which equals 1.5 times more than the emission of the entire Hungarian transportation sector and three times more compared what all Hungarian forests can digest.

“We are happy to note that regardless of the geopolitical difficulties, a wide range international, professional and scientific cooperations still exist on the field of nuclear energy, while Russia became the number one Uranium supplier of the United States this year, a number of American, German, French, Swedish, Swiss and even Austrian sub-contractors are working together with the Russian constructor of our nuclear expansion project.”

“It is the interest of all of us to prevent nuclear energy to become hostage of geopolitical conflicts, hypocrisy and ideological debates. Therefore let me finally thank all of you to interfere into the European Court case regarding our nuclear investment and to ensure the safe delivery of nuclear fuel to our existing plant.”

Speaking to journalists, Orbán reiterated that the issue of energy often became hostage to an ideological approach which, he said, was “bad”, arguing that energy was neither an ideological nor a geopolitical question, and should be rescued from that “trap”.

Orbán stated Hungary’s full support for nuclear energy as the only energy source that did not degrade the environment while providing large quantities of energy.

Orbán: Nuclear Energy Indispensable

Only nuclear energy can produce large quantities of cheap, safe and sustainable electricity, Viktor Orbán said in Brussels.

Speaking at the Nuclear Energy Summit 2024, organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the prime minister noted that Hungary has been using nuclear energy for some fifty years, “and this provides a stable basis for the safety of our energy supply”.

Around half of Hungary’s electricity is produced by its nuclear plant, which covers about one-third of its demand, he said.

“Based on this experience, we decided not only to maintain our already existing capacity, but to invest more into nuclear, and to increase its share into 70% when it comes to national electric supply,” Orbán said in his speech delivered in English.

“The challenges we have been faced with recently have further raised the significance of safe and secure supply of energy,” he said.

“The question became absolutely obvious: how can we generate big quantity of electricity in a cheap, safe, sustainable and environmentally friendly way. The answer is clear: it is only the nuclear way of generating electricity which can simultaneously satisfy all these requirements.”

PM Orbán's speech in English starts at 1:07:40
 

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