Orbán: ‘Manfred Weber insulted the Hungarian people’

“Here, everybody asked: what kind of person is this? Does he think we’re second-class Europeans? This affair was not about me, but about insulting the Hungarian people. We lost confidence in him,” Orbán said.

He said the problem is rather with the EPP, as Weber wants the same kind of coalition in Brussels as that between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin.

“Soon one won’t be able to tell the difference between conservatives and socialists,” Orbán said, adding that the EPP must preserve its “Christian-conservative character”.

Orbán said the European Parliament, which intervened in the process of advancing the EU budget and recovery, “vastly overestimates its role”.

He said the EP “thinks it has greater legitimacy than national parliaments”, which is “a big mistake”.

“We want to be part of a strong union of nation states that complies with the Treaties,” Orbán said.

He said Brussels was “not far” from becoming Moscow, drawing a comparison between the rule of law mechanism, “without objective criteria”, that European Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova wanted to introduce and the ideological directives issued by the central committee in Moscow under communism.

Orbán said the “real debate” is about family policy, migration policy and cultural issues.

Click here to read the interview in full, in German.