Given any two German newspapers, whether on the left or right, “you’ll read exactly the same thing on important issues”, he said. Orbán said western Europe was beset by “opinion-bludgeoning” beyond the comprehension of the average Hungarian, coupled with day-to-day oppression.

He said it was one thing to ban a campaign event and another to sack someone if their expressed opinion did not coincide with the official position. Posting on Facebook carried risks of such an outcome, he added. In Hungary, Orbán said, publicly expressed opinions were conservative or liberal, but no one would suffer negative consequences for expressing them.

Meanwhile, the prime minister said that European leaders were trying to manage migration rather than stopping it. “They are conducting elegant legal arguments, but actually they are implementing the Soros plan,” Orbán said in the interview.

Orbán said that while many were insisting that the Soros plan did not exist, the American-Hungarian financier “wrote his six-point plan himself in 2015”. He said the plan called for 1 million migrants to be allowed into Europe every year, and that the EU should take out a loan and issue bonds to finance the operation.

Also, Orbán said that the Soros plan conceived of “security zones” to be set up in the countries of origin of the migrants to ensure their passage to Europe.

The Hungarian government’s position was, he added, that “no one can tell Hungarians whom they want to allow into the country”. The important point about migration, he said, was whether a migrant was allowed to remain in the country while their application was assessed.

“This is the key to everything.” In the case of a negative decision, migrants would never go home, he said, as repatriation programmes were successful in only a quarter or a fifth of cases. This is why people applying for asylum must wait outside the borders, he added. “If a country does not state this, it cannot stop migration,” Orbán said.

Referring to the upcoming European Parliament elections, Orbán said that amid the many “sub-issues and problems in European life, the most important is the war”, adding that “the bureaucrats in Brussels and the Hungarian left wing” were “pro-war”. “We’re pro-peace,” Orbán said, adding that what was at stake in the election was whether Europe would be for peace or for war.

The incumbent Brussels leadership, he said, had “failed in all its important goals, so they don’t deserve another chance”. The prime minister said that in an the election campaign it was the time to fight rather than speculate, adding that “you must fight the opponent”, and this is why the ruling parties were launching their campaign on Friday.

On the topic of farmer protests in Europe, Orbán said they were justifiably rebelling because the EU represented Ukrainian oligarchs and large US companies and their interests over and above those of European farmers.

Ukrainian “grain dumping” was one of the unwelcome consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war, he added.
 

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