European Union leaders “are doing the bidding of a globalist elite” rather than representing the will of Hungarians or European citizens, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview to public radio on Friday. He said the European Union had been created to ensure peace and prosperity in Europe, but “there is war now, and we lag behind in the competition with the large economic blocs of the world such as China, Asia and the US.” “The Brussels leadership is making bad decisions that impact us all,” Orbán said, citing migration, the issue of Ukraine’s EU membership and the bloc’s relationship to the Russia-Ukraine war as examples. EU leaders “are not our men,” he said. Orbán said the public rejected migration and war, wanted peace as well as a well-planned green transition that did not destroy industries, he said. “The leadership in Brussels has been captured by a globalist elite and financial power interests,” he said, adding that they did not represent the interests of “the Hungarian, German, French or Italian people”. Change, he said, was needed to ensure that Brussels bureaucrats “finally do what’s in the interest of European citizens” and not the EU itself, “because we are the union”.
Regarding the situation in Ukraine, Orbán said an agreement in Istanbul had been ready to sign but “the Ukrainians didn’t sign at the behest of the US, or at least that’s the diplomatic gossip.” Europe’s stance during the 2015 Crimean crisis had been that the conflict must be contained “because an all-European conflict is not in our interest”. As the US entered the arena, a new approach replaced isolating the conflict with expanding it, he said. “That is not in the interest of Hungary or Europe,” he said. “The war is ruining Europe,” he said. “What we are doing now is unsustainable and should not be continued.” Hungary, he added, did not support sending weapons to Ukraine and continued to oppose “sending Hungarian taxpayers’ money there”. Orbán said Hungary was ready to provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine but “funding the Ukrainian state and helping them to fight with weapons bought with our money” would have dire consequences for Hungary and would result in bankruptcy. Regarding economic growth, Orbán said real wages had been growing since September. An OECD report said that real wages had been growing in Hungary since the second quarter, he said.