SINGAPORE — On May 4, during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán urged former U.S. President Donald Trump to stage a White House comeback.
“Come back, Mr. President, make America great again and bring us peace!” Orbán declared, based on a translation from the Associated Press (AP).
Orbán lamented the fact that Trump is no longer President. “I’m sure if President Trump were president today, there’d be no war inflicting Europe and Ukraine,” he proclaimed.
Trump and Orbán have had close ties for years. During the Trump presidency, David Cornstein, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, had also been a longtime friend of the president’s, further entrenching bilateral ties.
Previously this year, Orbán had encouraged Trump to “keep on fighting” in the wake of his legal headaches regarding the Stormy Daniels payment and other controversies. Orbán was the first European national leader to publicly back Trump’s candidacy in 2016, and endorsed the latter for his 2020 campaign as well.
Similarly, Trump had praised and backed Orbán during his campaign for his fourth successive term as Hungary’s premier. “Viktor Orbán of Hungary truly loves his country and wants safety for his people,” Trump stated.
“He has done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, and should be allowed to continue to do so in the upcoming election.” Orbán won the election by a considerable 20-point margin, 54 percent to 34 percent.
Due to his conservative and pro-life views, however, Orbán has met with backlash from within the globalist European Union (EU). For example, the bloc initially withheld billions in EU funding to Hungary on the pretext of misuse. It finally agreed with Budapest on a new deal in December, but is procrastinating in deploying the funding, informing Budapest that it is unable to supply the amount.
May’s two-day CPAC conference, the second in Hungary in as many years, encompassed segments that were titled “Make Kids Not War” and “No Country for Woke Men.” Moreover, a sign over the entrance to the venue, a conference hall on the Danube River, read, “No Woke Zone.”
During his speech at the conference, Orbán said Hungary had become “world-famous” for its tough stance on migration and cultural policies, giving participants a blueprint to enforce a similar conservative agenda back in their home countries.
The conservative Hungarian leader echoed fellow European officials and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s denunciations of global liberalism.
Singling out the leftist ideologies of transgenderism, illegal immigration, and “progressive” attempts to destabilize conservative governments around the world, Orbán remarked:
Hungary is an incubator where we experiment with the future of conservative politics. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.
“No migration, no gender, no war,” he added, exhorting his international audience to concentrate on these issues in their own countries.
In 2021, Orbán’s Fidesz party forbade the media from depicting homosexuality or sex reassignment to audiences under the age of 18. His government also banned information on homosexuality in school sex-education programs, as well as in advertisements and films for minors.
At CPAC, Orbán also posited that liberalism is undermining nations, leading to Western nations trailing behind Asian ones in demographic and economic terms. “The woke movement and gender ideology are exactly what Communism and Marxism used to be,” he said. “They artificially cut the nation into minorities in order to spark strife among the groups.”
Orbán also delivered a speech at last summer’s CPAC national conference in Texas, where he encouraged his audience to “take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels” and focus on winning the U.S. elections in 2024.
In opening comments this year, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp declared that CPAC in America had decided to “go Hungarian” in their attitude to the media, determining “who is a journalist and who is not a journalist” when deciding on which outlets to allow at their events.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson provided brief comments by video link, in one of his first public appearances since the network fired him in April. “I wish I was there in Budapest,” Carlson said. “If I ever … have some time and can leave, I will be there with you. But in the meantime, Godspeed.”
In March this year, Orbán pledged to continue vetoing any Western sanctions against Russia, including those in the nuclear energy sector that could potentially undermine Hungary’s economic interests. He had hitherto admitted that his country would remain reliant on fossil-fuel imports from Russia even in the near future, expressing confidence that Russia would prove to be a dependable supplier.
The prime minister also unveiled the government’s blueprint to ramp up the share of solar and wind power in Hungary’s energy mix, and pointed out the importance of investing in new gas-fired power plants for energy security.
However, Hungary’s developing economy needs 500,000 new workers, Orbán declared, elaborating that widespread investments in the energy sector should be accompanied by labor-force expansion to serve the industrial developments happening in eastern Hungary. While the Hungarian leader said he was relying on people from Serbia and Ukraine to fill the gap in the labor market, he maintained that Hungarian citizens would remain an employment priority.
On May 5, the European Commission published its proposal for the 11th sanction package against Russia, also targeting third countries such as China, Iran, and Kazakhstan, which are regarded as complicit in Moscow’s sanction-evasion measures, Politico reported.
“Those willing to make a profit, regardless of legal or moral circumstances, are ingenious in their tactics and methods,” the EU’s sanctions enforcer David O’Sullivan said in March, welcoming any proposal to boost the enforcement of EU sanctions.
