Hungary Rejects the Post-Western Future-Viktor Orbán

Generating much controversy in the western press gallery the following is a partial transcript from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s recent campus speech on the topic of demography, war with Russia and his nation’s schism with Western Liberalism. A full transcript can be found here.

To sum up, Ladies and Gentlemen,

What I want to say is that the West’s negative feelings about the world are due to the fact that the crucial energy and raw materials needed for economic development are no longer in the West’s hands. What it does possess is military power and capital. The question is what it can achieve with this in the present circumstances.

Following this, allow me to say something about us Hungarians. What questions must Hungary and the Hungarian nation answer today, how and in what order must we answer them? 

These questions are like the layers of a dobostorta [Hungarian layered sponge cake], stacked on top of each other: the most important at the bottom, the lighter and tastier morsels on top. This is the order that I will follow now.

The first and most important challenge, Dear Friends, continues to be population, or demography. 

The fact is that there are still far more funerals than baptisms. Whether we like it or not, the peoples of the world can be divided into two groups: those that are capable of biologically maintaining their numbers; and those that are not, which is the group that we belong to. Our situation has improved, but there has not been a turnaround. This is the alpha and omega of everything: if there is no turnaround, sooner or later we will be displaced from Hungary, and we will be displaced from the Carpathian Basin.

The second challenge is migration, which you could call population replacement or inundation. There is an outstanding 1973 book on this issue which was written in French, and recently published in Hungary. It is called “The Camp of the Saints” [Le Camp des Saints], and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself. 

Migration has split Europe in two – or I could say that it has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples. 

I could also say that it is no longer the Western world, but the post-Western world. And around 2050, the laws of mathematics will lead to the final demographic shift: cities in this part of the continent – or that part – will see the proportion of residents of non-European origin rising to over 50 per cent of the total. 

And here we are in Central Europe – in the other half of Europe, or of the West. If it were not somewhat confusing, I could say that the West – let’s say the West in its spiritual sense – has moved to Central Europe: the West is here, and what is left over there is merely the post-West. 

A battle is in progress between the two halves of Europe. We made an offer to the post-Westerners which was based on tolerance or leaving one another in peace, allowing each to decide for themselves whom they want to live alongside; but they reject this and are continuing to fight against Central Europe, with the goal of making us like them. I shall leave to one side the moral commentary they attach to this – after all, this is such a lovely morning. There is now less talk about migration, but, believe me, nothing has changed: Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us. 

They have also taken us to court over the Hungarian border defence system, and they have delivered a verdict against us. For a number of reasons not much can be said about this now, but we have been pronounced guilty. If it were not for the Ukrainian refugee crisis they would have started to enforce this judgement on us, and how that situation plays out will be accompanied by a great deal of suspense.

 But now war has broken out and we are receiving arrivals from Ukraine, and so this issue has been put aside – they have not taken it off the agenda, but just put it to one side. It is important that we understand them. It is important that we understand that these good people over there in the West, in the post-West, cannot bear to wake up every morning and find that their days – and indeed their whole lives – are poisoned by the thought that all is lost. So we do not want to confront them day and night. 

All we ask is that they do not try to impose on us a fate which we do not see as simply a fate for a nation, but as its nemesis. This is all we ask, and no more.

In such a multi-ethnic context, there is an ideological feint here that is worth talking about and focusing on. The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim – their claim – that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. 

This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. 

Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. 

And, given a favourable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. 

This is why we fought at Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and – if I am not mistaken – this is why, in still older times – the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers. Today the situation is that Islamic civilisation, which is constantly moving towards Europe, has realised – precisely because of the traditions of Belgrade/Nándorfehérvár – that the route through Hungary is an unsuitable one along which to send its people up into Europe. 

This is why Poitiers has been replayed; now the incursion’s origins are not in the East, but in the South, from where they are occupying and flooding the West. This might not yet be a very important task for us, but it will be for our children, who will need to defend themselves not only from the South, but also from the West. 

The time will come when we have to somehow accept Christians coming to us from there and integrate them into our lives. This has happened before; and those whom we do not want to let in will have to be stopped at our western borders – Schengen or no Schengen. But this is not the task of the moment, and not a task for our lifetime. Our task is solely to prepare our children to be able to do this. As [House Speaker] László Kövér has said in an interview, we must make sure that good times do not create weak men, and that those weak men do not bring hard times upon our people.

Demography, migration, and the next layer is gender – and what we call the Child Protection Act. There is less talk of this now because other things are occupying the front pages of the newspapers, but let us not forget that on this issue, too, we have been taken to court – and we await the verdict. The only result we have achieved here is partly – or perhaps entirely – thanks to Minister Judit Varga. 

We have managed to separate our big debate on the whole gender issue from the debate on EU money, and the two are now moving forward on separate tracks. Here too, our position is simple. We are asking for another offer of tolerance: we do not want to tell them how they should live; we are just asking them to accept that in our country a father is a man and a mother is a woman, and that they leave our children alone. And we ask them to see to it that George Soros’s army also accepts this. It is important for people in the West to understand that in Hungary and in this part of the world this is not an ideological question, but quite simply the most important question in life. In this corner of the world there will never be a majority in favour of the Western lunacy – my apologies to everyone – that is being played out over there. 

Quite simply, Hungarians – or the sons of some other peoples – cannot get their heads around this. There are all these gender things: transnational and transgender; but the furthest we can go with that is to say “Transylvania” – although in Hungarian that is called “Erdély”. We cannot go any further than that. So I ask you not to be misled, not to be deceived: there is a war, an energy crisis, an economic crisis and wartime inflation, and all of this is drawing a screen in front of our eyes, a screen between us and the issue of gender and migration. But in fact it is on these issues that the future will be decided. 

This is the great historic battle that we are fighting: demography, migration and gender. And this is precisely what is at stake in the battle between the Left and the Right. 

I will not mention the name of a friendly country, but just refer to it. There is a country where the Left has won, and where one of its first measures has been to dismantle its border fence; and the second measure has been to recognise every “gender rule” – not only same-sex marriage, but also such couples’ right to adopt children. Let us not be fooled by current conflicts: these are the issues which will decide our future.

How can we protect ourselves? First, by being determined. Then by looking for allies. This is what has given the V4 its importance. So what has recently given the Visegrád Four its great importance is that on these issues we have been able to speak with one voice. Indeed it is no accident that the post-Westerners did their best to dismantle the Visegrád Four. In addition, war has intervened, and this has shaken the Polish-Hungarian cooperation that has been the axis of V4 cooperation. 

As regards the war, the Poles and the Hungarians have the same strategic interest: they do not want the Russians to come any closer, they want Ukraine’s sovereignty to be preserved, and they want Ukraine to be a democracy. We both want exactly the same things, and yet this war is making relations with our friends difficult. This is because when it comes to matters of the head, the interests that I have talked about are clearly aligned; but the problem is matters of the heart. 

The problem in Hungarian-Polish relations is one of the heart. We Hungarians see this war as a war between two Slavic peoples, and as one which we want to stay out of. But the Poles see it as a war in which they are also involved: it is their war, and they are almost fighting it. And since this is a matter of the heart, we cannot come to an agreement with each other on it, but must use our intellect to salvage everything we can from the Polish-Hungarian friendship and strategic alliance for the post-war period. 

Of course we still have our Slovak and Czech friends, but there have been changes of government in those countries, where they currently prefer the post-Western world, and they do not want to engage in conflicts with Brussels – from which they are receiving good grades. In my opinion this is like tying up their horses in a burning stable. Good luck with that!

The ninth key to a successful strategy of local exceptionalism is our intellectual and spiritual foundations. Hungary still has its national conception, its sphere of national sentiment, its culture, and a language capable of describing a complete Hungarian world.

And finally, the tenth factor that offers us a chance of success is what I call ambition. Hungary has ambition. Hungary has communal ambitions, and indeed national ambitions. It has national ambitions, and even European ambitions. This is why, in order to preserve our national ambitions, we must show solidarity in the difficult period ahead of us. The motherland must stand together, and Transylvania and the other areas in the Carpathian Basin inhabited by Hungarians must stand together. This ambition, 

Dear Friends, this what propels us, what drives us – it is our fuel. It is the notion that we have always given more to the world than we have received from it, that more has been taken from us than given to us, that we have submitted invoices that are still unpaid, that we are better, more industrious and more talented than the position we now find ourselves in and the way in which we live, and the fact that the world owes us something – and that we want to, and will, call in that debt. This is our strongest ambition.

Thank you for listening. Go Hungary, go Hungarians!