Donald Trump’s victory marks the end of “liberal non-democracy” and will allow the West to break free from the “captivity of ideologies” that distort reality through political correctness, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said.
The election outcome indicates a shift in popular thinking in the West, Orbán said in remarks made yesterday evening on a trip to London, and this morning at a conference organised by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
During his one-day official visit to Britain’s capital, the Central European leader commented that the Republican candidate’s big win represents a victory for freedom of thought in the Western world.
He told reporters: “The world has always benefited whenever it has managed to release itself from the captivity of currently dominant ideological trends. In my view, this is what has happened just now in the United States.
“This also gives the rest of the Western world the chance to free itself from the captivity of ideologies, of political correctness, and of modes of thought and expression which are remote from reality: the chance to come back down to earth and see the world as it really is.”
This morning in Budapest, Hungary’s Prime Minister struck a similar tone, announcing that today is “the second day of a historic event, in which Western civilisation appears to successfully break free from the confines of an ideology”.
Though not explicitly referring to Trump’s victory in the November 8 election, Orbán told the conference: “We are living in the days where what we call liberal non-democracy – in which we lived for the past 20 years – ends, and we can return to real democracy.
“We can call problems by their name and find solutions not derived from an ideology but based on pragmatic, creative thinking rooted in common sense,” Orbán said.
Exclaiming that “it’s a wonderful world”, Hungary’s Prime Minister also linked the U.S. election result with Britain’s vote to leave the European Union (EU).
“Brexit is not a tragedy, even remotely. It is not a defeat, but an attempt by a great nation to make itself successful in other ways than what everyone else had considered the path to success,” he told the room.
In July, a spokesman for the Hungarian government called the exodus of people from the third world to Europe “the most acute challenge we face”. The Orbán administration has been active in its opposition to mass migration over the past two years, erecting fences on their southern borders to prevent the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants using the Balkan route to continue north into Western Europe.