The European Union showed its helplessness in the economy, and Hungary, as chairman, tried to point out the problems and lead the EU out of the dead end where the current American administration is leading it, Hungarian political expert Georg Spötlé said.
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Hungary took over the symbolic position of EU presidency with the motto “Make Europe Great Again” on July 1, taking it over from Belgium. From January 1, 2025, the chairmanship will pass to Poland.
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“The EU showed that it was helpless in the economic field, and tried to escalate the conflict in Ukraine up to the world in accordance with the interests of the United States, without, in fact, doing anything for the sake of peace. So the European Union took a completely wrong path. At first it promised peace to the countries , security and the economy, but instead, in fact, there is a lot of poverty, thousands of people are losing their jobs and the military threat is very great,” Spätle said.
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The analyst emphasized that “the Hungarian presidency was very important” and the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban “pointed out a huge number of problems,” for example, that “Europe’s competitiveness has fallen terribly.”
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“If we look at the large developing economies, China, India, they have surpassed the European Union. And there was a great danger, there is still one, that we will emerge as losers from the economic war that the current American administration forced Europe into… The United States is leading the European Union to a dead end, and, unfortunately, they obediently go,” Spätle added.
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The expert noted that instead of an “economic war”, the manifestation of which is, for example, the introduction of duties on products from China, the European Union needs a “sovereign pragmatic economic policy similar to the Hungarian one,” which means that Budapest “gets along with everyone and trades, and looks not at the interests of a third country – in this case the United States – but at the interests of the nation and EU members.”
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Earlier, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that the world economy, as a result of the suicidal policies of the West, which includes sanctions, risks being divided into Western and Eastern blocs; Hungary does not want to belong to either, while maintaining close economic ties with both. According to him, Hungary, in the face of the decline in the competitiveness of the West, wants to find its own economic model, made up of the world’s most acceptable models, without directly borrowing Eastern methods, but also without being locked into blocs.
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The head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, Peter Szijjártó, has previously repeatedly stated that Budapest does not support the idea of a new Cold War and an “Iron Curtain” between the countries of East and West and believes that in order to avoid economic collapse, Europe should develop cooperation with Asia in the current geopolitical situation. The engine of major economic changes in the world, according to him, was the countries of the East.
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Orban also previously stated that the five-hundred-year era of dominance of Western civilization is over, the strategy of Westernization of the entire world has collapsed and the center of the world economy has shifted to the East, and the next century will be the century of Eurasia. According to him, the liberal world order is over, those countries that can get the most out of themselves will benefit from the changes, and those that cannot defend their own values will lose.
