Viktor Orban’s Plan: We will take care of Brussels

Hungarian conservative prime minister Viktor Orban reaffirmed Monday that he does not seek to leave his country from the EU, but wants to restrict the competences of the European Union and for this purpose to ‘occupy’ Brussels to turn into a ‘coordination center’ of the member countries.

« We will occupy the EU and turn it into a » Union coordination center « , which respects the sovereignty of the Member States, » Orban said before the Budapest Parliament.

Asked there if he wants to leave Hungary from the EU, he assured that he has no such intention, but he insisted that he wants to transform the Community block in the sense of restricting the prerogatives of the institutions in Brussels, which he considers to have taken too much power.

‘We will not leave the EU. We will not abandon Brussels, but we will deal with it. For this I founded the political family of the patriots’, said Orban, referring to the new sovereign political group that he has entered in the European Parliament.

The Hungarian prime minister said two weeks ago that he had repeatedly received encouragement from US President Donald Trump to leave the EU, but categorically rejected the idea.

In a speech held on April 23 at a forum in Pilisvörösvár, Orban said Trump asked him when he would withdraw Hungary from the EU, a question to which the Hungarian prime minister said: ‘Mr. President, we need a good offer’.

Orban also claimed that Trump regularly asks this question in telephone discussions, and he always gives him the same answer, namely that Hungary will leave the EU when it will be more advantageous for it to be outside the Community block, especially considering that 85% of Hungary’s exports go to the EU states.

The Hungarian prime minister is in permanent conflict with the European Commission, who accuses him of violating the rule of law by limiting the rights of the LGBT community, rejecting illegal migrants, controlling the press, justice and public procurement or challenging the priority of the EU Court of Justice (CJUE) on the national law, to the RUBAN, which is added to the RUS. Vladimir Putin.

For all this, the European Commission has blocked the National Plan for Redress and Resility (PNRR), by which this country has the right to grants worth 5.8 billion euros from the European Post-Pandemic recovery plan.

Moreover, Brussels activated against Budapest in December 2022 the new conditionality mechanism that allows the European Commission to suspend European funds to those member countries, which they consider to violate the rule of law, thus suspending about 23 billion euros from Hungary’s cohesion. From these cohesion funds were unlocked by the European Commission only about a third at the end of 2023, when Hungary threatened to block the EU aid for Ukraine in the War with Russia.