Budapest Times March 15, 2022
Orbán: ‘We won’t allow left wing to drag Hungary into war’
“We won’t allow the left wing to drag Hungary into war,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Tuesday, addressing a March 15 national holiday commemoration in front of Parliament. Orbán declared that voters who wanted peace and security would cast their ballots for the ruling Fidesz-led alliance in the April 3 general election.
Orbán insisted that the left wing had “lost their common sense” and “they would sleep-walk” into a “cruel, lengthy and bloody war”. He accused the left wing of planning to send Hungarian soldiers and Hungarian weapons to the war in Ukraine.
“We will not allow it. We will not allow the left wing to drag Hungary in this war. We will not allow the left wing to make Hungary a military target and to make Hungarians and ethnic Hungarians in Transcarpathia military targets,” he added.
Hungarians know very well “who tends to pocket the profits of such wars…but we are strong and we are resisting the plans of the left wing and the troublemakers who are behind them,” he said.
Referring to the recent presidential election, Orbán said the timing of Hungary’s election of a woman president had been “perfect”. He cited the incoming head of state, Katalin Novak, as saying that women “want to win peace, not war”.
“If we want to put an end to war and if we want Hungary to stay out of the war, we must listen to women,” he said. “Mothers know that it takes twenty years to raise a man, but a man can be destroyed in twenty seconds,” he said.
Orbán said Hungary must stay out of the war “because no Hungarian should come between a Ukrainian anvil and a Russian hammer”, and this was why Hungary refused to send soldiers or weapons into the theatre of war.
He said Hungary must represent its own interests calmly and courageously. “It isn’t in our interest to become footsoldier victims in someone else’s war,” he said.
“Some countries want to achieve their goals through warfare, but we know that the best war is one that can be avoided,” he added.
“Russia will consider Russian interests; Ukraine will consider Ukrainian interests, but the United States and Brussels will not think with a Hungarian head or feel with a Hungarian heart,” he said.
Orbán noted that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, and Hungarian soldiers and police must guarantee Hungary’s southern and eastern borders with arms.
Hungary, he added, was now engaged in its largest humanitarian aid programme of all time. “Meanwhile, the energy crisis of western Europe is now knocking on our door.”
“It has taken two years to defeat a global pandemic…and if that’s not enough, now we have the Hungarian left wing to contend with, too. We live in an era of dangers,” Orbán said, adding that the threat of war did not reduce what was at stake at the upcoming election but rather the opposite: “it raises it sky-high”.