Hungary’s Orbán Adresses the Collapse of the Western System

At a ceremony in Romania on July 27, the Hungarian Prime Minister raised some remarkable points, which will hopefully be read and reflected upon by other European leaders. While one may strongly object to Viktor Orbán’s positions on a number of other issues, on the points brought up here, he shows more insight than his European counterparts.

Speaking at the close of a traditional summer university organized in Baile Tusnad by Hungarian NGOs and organizations of the Hungarian minority in Romania, the leader of Hungary noted that “what we are facing is actually a world system change. And this is a process starting from the direction of Asia. To put it briefly and primitively, in the next long, long decades, but maybe in centuries, because the previous world system also overlapped for 500 years, Asia will be the dominant center of the world. China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and so on….”

Turning to Russia, he pointed to the futility of the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU. “Even now, the West issued its expectation, its instruction, that the world should take a stand against Russia and stand by the West on a moral basis. In contrast, the reality has become that everyone is slowly supporting Russia,” Orbán went on. For some countries this was not surprising, he remarked. But for others, such as India and NATO-member Türkiye, as well as the Muslim world, this was “completely unexpected….”

Orbán went on to state that Russia has “hyper-rational leadership,” which is “understandable and predictable.” “On the other hand, the behavior of the West … is not understandable, and not predictable. The West is not led, its behavior is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation.”

He brought up the controversy over the West’s forcing of LGBTQ rights on countries around the world, with those that refuse to do so being labeled as “backward”. However, most of them do not agree, which means that Vladimir Putin’s “strongest tactical weapon” is his resistance to the West’s attempts to impose this worldview.

The PM also pointed to the Nord Stream sabotage as further evidence of the duplicity and corruption existing in the West: “We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it…” In the same way, “we failed to do the right thing in the case of the phone tapping of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the assistance of Denmark. So this is nothing but an act of submission.”