Hungarian PM delivers state of the nation speech ahead of polls

Budapest : Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivered a state-of-the-nation speech here, the first day of the official start of the campaign for the April 3 general elections.

The Hungarian leader started his hour-long speech by recalling how the Hungarian government made a stand during the Covid-19 pandemic, whereas the situation in Europe was much worse, reports Xinhua news agency.

“The country’s ability to act was not in jeopardy for a moment and most people think Hungary defended itself quite well,” he said.

“This was not the case in Europe: people’s confidence had evaporated from governments and protests had to be suppressed by force,” he added.

He warned a “crumbling economy” if the Left, his political opponents, rules. “In the end, both taxes and debt are in the sky, and they have a crumbling economy: unemployment, austerity measures, mountains of debts, IMF: No money.”

Speaking of concrete measures, Orban announced that the fuel price cap would be extended for another three months.

He also said that the country’s coronavirus vaccine factory in Debrecen would be operational by the end of the year.

Orban warned that the Hungarian hard stance on migration would be only “alive as long as Fidesz (the centre-right Hungarian political party) was in government.”

In Saturday’s speech, which was his 23rd such occasion, Orban said his administration’s ongoing row with the European Union (EU) Commission was a dispute in the ways Western and Hungarian societies viewed migration.

“The EU is supporting the invasion (migration wave),” Orban said, calling his fight with Brussels a “jihad” over the “rule of law”.

About the Balkan region, Orban said that these countries needed to be included in the EU, and a Balkan Marshall package was needed for helping these southern European countries to catch up.

On the build-up of tensions between Moscow and Kiev, he underlined that war had to be avoided because it could bring millions of migrants from Ukraine to Hungary.

Hungary’s 7.8 million voters will have the opportunity to cast two ballots in the single-round election deciding 199 seats of Parliament.

One ballot directly elects lawmakers in 106 individual constituencies, while the remaining seats are distributed based on votes cast for a party list.

Orban is facing his closest contest since coming to power in 2010 after six opposition parties formed an electoral alliance, uniting behind 49-year-old Peter Marki-Zay, a conservative mayor in rural Hungary.