Budapest has vowed to ‘keep Hungary Hungarian’ after the country’s governing Fidesz party won a massive victory in European Parliament elections on Sunday on a platform of countering mass immigration.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose party won a record 52 per cent of the vote, said that the government would do everything it could to represent the will of the Hungarian people, who he said had trusted Fidesz to “bring change to Brussels” and to support a Europe of nations rather than a bureaucrat-run EU superstate, local media reports.
The outcome of these elections,which saw the left-wing Democratic Coalition placed second with just 16 per cent, also underlined Hungarians’ desire to “protect Christian culture” and to halt mass migration to the bloc, stressed the populist leader, speaking at a rally in Budapest.
In an interview with conservative news portal 888.hu on Monday, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó commented that the “record high support” seen for Fidesz at the polls will “strengthen the government in its task of preserving Hungary as a Hungarian country and the EU as a union of Europeans”.
“We have now been given a strong mandate by voters to protect our Christian culture, to support progress towards a Europe of sovereign nations and to prevent immigrants from coming into Hungary,” he said.
Speaking in the national parliament on Monday, Orbán — who was reelected for a third term in last year’s general election with Fidesz winning by a landslide — hailed “unprecedented” GDP growth over the past year, comparing the “dynamism” of Hungary’s economy with the “less rosy” economic performance of western Europe, adding that the election results are evidence that Hungarians support the government’s new family-friendly policy.
The programmes, which include tax breaks for families who have more than four children, were slammed in the German media last week for supposedly evoking “memories of the Nazi dictatorship” during the 1930s, with newspaper Welt blasting Hungary for aiming “to maintain a homogenous nation” rather than bringing in migration from the third world to boost the national birth rate.
Guy Verhofstadt, the arch-globalist leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE) parliamentary grouping lamented the poor showing of his Hungarian allies, Momentum, who he complained “no one would have thought” would win only ten per cent of the vote and two EU Parliament seats on Sunday.
“There is no real democracy in Hungary!” he raged to euronews, adding: “I was there and I saw no real democracy in Hungary!”