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ORBÁN: EUROPE CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT NATIONS

 

Without its nations, Europe would lose its spiritual and cultural identity, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said, addressing a European People’s Party (EPP) congress in Helsinki. “Europe will either be a Europe of nations or it will cease to exist,” Orbán told the congress ahead of a vote on the lead candidate for the post of European Commission president. “The accession of central European nations has made Europe more peaceful, stronger and richer”, he said. The continent’s strength has always been based on strong nations, he said.
Orbán accused the liberals, socialists and greens of wanting a rootless Europe devoid of its spiritual and psychological identity. “Our vision is a Europe with 27 faces, one that is Christian and democratic simultaneously.”
Orbán called the EPP “a party of victors” which preferred keeping its feet on the ground rather than championing “world-redeeming ideologies”. Over the past few years, the EPP has given the leadership of Europe, so it has to take responsibility for “failure to keep Britain in the union and the migrants outside it.” While in 2011, sixteen member states were governed by EPP parties, now that number is down to six, he said. “No wonder our confidence has been shaken.”
Orbán noted that Friday will be the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “We, the states thrown into the claws of the Soviet Union … knew that we can only regain our freedom in a united Europe,” he said. The Fidesz party was born in the fight for that reunification, in 1988, and invited to the European People’s Party by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, “who understood that members of a family are always united, even if they disagree,” Orbán said.