Orbán cites ʼliberal imperialismʼ conspiracy over CJEU ruling

Viktor Orbán (Photo by Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock.com)

"There is a liberal imperialism originating in Western Europe, and U.S. Democrats, the U.S. left-wing is also part of it," Orbán claimed in a weekly interview on public radio today (Friday).

These forces "try to impose their world view, choice of values, perceptions, including their views on family, on migration, on work, or rather unemployment, on other countries that think differently about the family, migration, order, and so on," he added.

While noting his dislike for the "easy answer" of blaming conspiracies for international opposition against Hungary, Orbán said "there are conspiracies."

The PM accused "forces operating behind the scenes" of circumventing formal frameworks, adding that this could "clearly be seen from certain legal rulings."

EU recovery plan: greater opportunity than risk

Orbán also said that the opportunity presented by a European Union recovery plan addressing the coronavirus crisis outweighs the risks in the case of Hungary.

"Now, a number of European Union countries are in such a degraded state from a financial perspective that we can hardly avoid approving Hungaryʼs consent to take out large-scale, joint credit," Orbán said.

"That presents a risk on the one hand and an opportunity on the other," he said, explaining that if that money is poorly spent, it will lead to failure, but if the money is well spent, "we can grow stronger."

The PM added that the cabinet had established a working group to determine the scale of funding Hungary would receive in the framework of the EUʼs recovery plan and to what purposes that money would be allocated.

He said the funding could be used to support "backlogged" projects, such as upgrading the electricity transmission system and connecting small solar parks to the network, waterworks developments, and re-capitalizing universities.

"We have a number of programs that we can activate immediately, for which that money can be sensibly used, not wasted [...]. Because we have these existing programs, itʼs not a problem for us to use a large amount of EU funding to strengthen the economy," he said.

Orbán reiterated that Hungarians are, by nature, not inclined to sharing risk when it comes to borrowing, but said the possible benefits to Hungary of credit for the EU recovery plan outweigh the risks.

"I feel that in the case of Hungary the risk is not zero, but it presents much more of an opportunity than a risk," he concluded.