Viktor Orbán Addresses Inflation, Rising Food Prices, and Foreign Relations in Radio Interview

Viktor Orbán gave an interview to Radio Kossuth on Friday morning, in which he addressed issues such as inflation, rising food prices, relations with neighboring countries and energy Hirado.hu.

The prime minister stressed that his government’s job is to curb inflation, hence the price freezes, interest rate freeze, price surveillance system and mandatory promotions. He said that “the process of what we call disinflation has begun” and that the target of bringing inflation below 10 percent by the end of the year is achievable.

Viktor Orbán’s suffocation

The big grocery chains and multinationals are behaving like price speculators: they raise prices even when there is no basis for doing so.

The prime minister stressed that although the whole country is fighting against inflation and especially against the increase in food prices, “unfortunately there are some who are not taking part in this fight and are even taking advantage of the situation”.

He said that

multinationals are raising the prices of imported food and that at least part of the increase in the price of Hungarian products goes back to Hungarian farmers, while the increase in the price of imported food is unjustified and unacceptable.

He emphasized that this was simply “profit making”. “We resist them,” but they “denounce us in Brussels,” he added.

He pointed out that the government has already imposed 3 billion forints (EUR 7.8 million) in fines, that agencies and consumer protection are “going back and forth” and that this number of fines should be increased. He stressed that “just because we live in an era of high inflation, we cannot accept that there is unjustified speculation in food prices”, that this is outrageous and wrong and that it must be addressed.

Recalling his speech in Tusnad (Tusnádfürdő, Băile Tușnad) in Romania last week, Viktor Orbán said that the Free Summer University and student camp in Bálványos (Tusványos) is an iconic place for the national side and the genre of his speech there is not to be defined. He said that he takes the opportunity to speak in Bad Tuschnad (Tusnádfürdő, Băile Tușnad) to offer joint thinking, which is why the reactions are always more exciting than the speech itself.

In connection with Tusványos, the Prime Minister emphasized that he saw great potential in cooperation with Romania and Slovakia: “We could do a lot of good things together in the coming time”. Regarding Slovakia, he pointed out that elections will be held in September. Viktor Orbán said that the two countries could not agree on the issue of the successor states and that it was a mistake to put this issue at the center of Slovak-Hungarian relations as it should be left to historians. He pointed out that the Slovak approach to this issue differs significantly from the Hungarian one. Hungarians do not draw boundaries between eras, “We Hungarians have been in a flow for 1,100 years, for us it is not a broken, fragmented history, but a history,” he recalled.

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Regarding the economic situation, the Prime Minister said that “we hit two different meteorites”, with many people dying during the Covid, which was very painful for Hungary for a year and a half. He reminded that the war is different now because it is not threatening jobs for the time being. Before the war Hungary had full employment and the war could not change that. Also, despite rising energy prices, the Hungarian population still pays the lowest electricity bills in all of Europe, which is a great achievement of the economy, he added.

Regarding the EU funds, the prime minister said the European Union owes Hungary around EUR 2 billion for border protection and building fences, EUR 800 billion for teachers, as it promised to raise teachers’ salaries faster, and also the funds of the Recovery Fund, set up to help Member States recover quickly from the epidemic. It is not for nothing that we ask if they owe us money because it has already been spent on something else, e.g. B. for Ukraine, he explained.

Regarding the war in Ukraine, Viktor Orbán said that the war was very costly and today only money from the West keeps Ukraine alive and the Ukrainian army operational. He pointed out that

Public opinion is increasingly questioning the justification for financing the war, seeing less and less how this war can be won and what sense there is in financing the war instead of peaceful negotiations.

Meanwhile, politicians in Brussels are sticking to their previous position, ie going in the opposite direction, he stressed.

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On the subject of migration, the Prime Minister said that if you ‘shrink’ migrants into a package, people come into the country that we don’t know, who were not chosen by us but smuggled in by smugglers. It’s a different culture, a different behavior that can destroy a country. “We Hungarians also consider the risk to be so high that we do not want to take part in such an experiment. We don’t want migrant camps and if we don’t want them, they won’t be in Hungary,” the prime minister stressed.

Via Hungary Today; Titelbild: MTI/Prime Minister’s Press Office/Zoltán Fischer