Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán responded to European Union president Jean-Claude Juncker’s description of him as a “blind national politician” in brutal fashion, suggesting he would not expect a Luxembourger to understand national pride.
“It’s hard to see the world through the eyes of a Luxembourger,” Orbán said of the outgoing President of the European Commission in an interview with Kossuth Radio, a transcript of which was seen by Breitbart London.
“In negotiations, I sometimes wonder how my counterpart sees the world. What does someone from Luxembourg say when they want to be proud of themselves or their nation?” he asked.
“For a Hungarian it’s clear that if there’s one thing we want, it’s for Hungary to be respected and appreciated, and for us to be seen as Hungarians,” he explained.
“We don’t want to scrape away from ourselves the undeniable fact that we’re Hungarian… We’re part of a fantastic culture, and we speak a fantastic language… We have a fantastic history, the essence of which is in standing tall and standing our ground to defend something: in the most difficult times, in the most difficult circumstances, against overwhelmingly superior numbers,” he said proudly.
Prime Minister Orbán insisted that “I am European because I am Hungarian”, and that “If I weren’t Hungarian, I couldn’t be European either” — explaining that only when the European Union is “built as a shared home from nations, and from the identities of nations and national pride” will patriots “with national feelings” be able to “truly feel at home in Europe, and… be able to accept the institutions of the European Union.”
However, the Hungarian’s vision of a future European Union — reminiscent of the late French premier Charles De Gaulle’s conception of a “Europe of nations” — cuts little ice with the EU establishment, which greets people arriving at the Visitor Centre of the European Parliament with a plaque which reads: “…national sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our time… The only final remedy for this supreme and catastrophic evil of our time is a federal union of the peoples…”
Indeed, the views of European federalists like Guy Verhofstadt MEP, the former prime minister of Belgium who acts as the European Parliament’s representative in the Brexit talks who recently appealed to the British to embrace a future as provincials with a European empire, which have far more currency within the EU’s corridors of power.