Roger Köppel: After his meeting with Alice Weidel, is Viktor Orbán, like Elon Musk, convinced that only Alternative for Germany [AfD] can save Germany?
Viktor Orbán: I believe that a country can only be saved by its own people. Before the meeting I hoped that I’d meet the leader of an important party capable of shaping Germany’s destiny. And I did – I met the future of Germany.
Roger Köppel: The Patriots for Europe alliance has certain reservations about the AfD – above all, I think, in France. Do you think these reservations have disappeared and that you’ve brought the AfD into the fold?
Viktor Orbán: No, the reservations are still there, and they’re strong. The election in Germany this weekend may help a lot to make the AfD more acceptable to the Patriots, but there will be no breakthrough as a result of this election. With persistent work, however, a strong parliamentary party can change that in a year. This will require a convincing, responsible parliamentary performance, and there’s a good chance of that.
Zoltán Szalai: What was your first impression, and what was the most surprising thing you learned about each other?
Alice Weidel: I’m very happy and proud to be here in Budapest. I asked for a meeting with Viktor Orbán because I think it’s important to build good relations with the countries in the region, and we have a lot to improve in our relations with Hungary. We’re the second largest power in Germany, with corresponding influence. I want to have a good relationship with Viktor Orbán, and I consider him to be a man of reason in Europe. He’s the antithesis of Angela Merkel: Merkel pursued policy against her own people and her own country, while Orbán has worked with Hungary to protect us from illegal migration.
Viktor Orbán: What surprised me was that although I knew that we were welcoming a lady who is a freedom fighter, in our country that category is a bit more “völkisch”. I am a village man, and here the fight for freedom is a more brutal genre. Now I met an elegant freedom fighter.
Zoltán Szalai: What was discussed in the meeting?
Alice Weidel: We reviewed the situation in Hungary, Germany and the EU, and discussed the options each country has for reforming the EU. We agreed that the EU needs to be reformed. Brussels is like a disordered, bureaucratic factory, and expensive too. It cannot make clear decisions. The whole factory must be dismantled, and competences must be returned to where the elected parliaments sit, in the Member States – not somewhere in the alien mothership that is Brussels.
Viktor Orbán: I was surprised by the incisive analysis of the situation of the German middle class. In the Hungarian mind there’s an image which today I learned to be false. We Hungarians think of the German middle class as a stratum of unshakable status, with secure property, income, predictable prospects and great purchasing power. The party leader painted a different picture, revealing how fragile the German middle class is today. This is of great political importance, especially when there’s a problem for democracy in a country. It’s not my job to criticise Germany, but there are some things that can be clearly seen from Hungary. The fact that 70 per cent of Germans want a strong anti-migration policy, but their leaders refuse to acknowledge this, is a problem for democracy. The fact that the people want an economic policy that strengthens the middle class, but this isn’t what they’re getting from their leaders, is a problem for democracy. In a democratic system, you cannot pursue policies against the will of the people with impunity. That will be a problem. In a democracy, only political forces that represent the basic needs and aspirations of the people have a future. This must be translated into the language of political decisions and implemented. If this doesn’t happen, sooner or later the whole democratic edifice will collapse, and someone will come along – in my opinion, the AfD – who will offer the policies that the people are demanding.
Alice Weidel: I think that, because of the distortions of the mainstream media, Europeans aren’t fully aware that there’s a democratic deficit in the EU. The EU isn’t itself democratic. There’s dysfunction in the horizontal and vertical division of power. As regards the horizontal aspect, decisions are taken exclusively by the European Commission, when in fact it is the executive branch. No one has elected it, yet it has the power to initiate legislation, which is normally the exclusive prerogative of parliaments. The European Parliament has no such power, it’s a sham parliament, and the executive and the legislature have been merged in an unelected body. This is a serious democratic deficit – quite apart from the judiciary. Vertical separation of powers is also essential. The principle of subsidiarity is enshrined in the European Treaties. This means that decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level, because at local level people know best what their problems are. But this isn’t how the European Union works. Decisions are taken at the top, so national law is subjugated to supranational law.
Viktor Orbán: And there’s another problem here, which I have personal experience of. When things are going well, the democratic deficit is unpleasant, but not painful. But when things are going badly, political leadership is needed – and a bureaucracy is incapable of political leadership. In the European Union political power is vested in the bureaucracy. A bureaucracy always has an interest in maintaining the status quo, but a political leader always has an interest in finding the right answers to problems. This is why there’s no political leadership in the Union today. This should be the job of Germany and France, but for the moment both countries are preoccupied with their own problems. They expect the Commission to lead the European Union on their behalf, but the Commission is unfit to do so.
Alice Weidel: We see this lack of leadership at the moment in the whole tariffs dispute with the US. The fact that Donald Trump is threatening tariffs is a serious economic and political problem. But there’s no one to negotiate with Trump. Who speaks for the Union? To whom should he turn? Certainly not to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen... For a pragmatic leader like Donald Trump, who wants to protect his own industries, the other potential negotiating party is China. It’s easier for him to deal with an authoritarian China than with Europe, which has no leadership.
Roger Köppel: Do you think the European Union can be reformed at all?
Viktor Orbán: The Patriots have a historic mission: to win back the Union for the people of Europe. We must force Brussels to do what the European people want. We need to stop migration, we need to replace the Green Deal with an energy policy that makes energy cheap, and we need to bring these policies to a victorious conclusion in Brussels. On the question of whether the European Union can be reformed, we don’t yet know the answer to that, because we haven’t tried yet. How can we start to reform? We need a majority in the decision-making bodies of the European Union. One such body is the European Council, where the prime ministers sit. I’m still in a minority there at the moment, perhaps strengthened by the Prime Minister of Italy and Robert Fico. If we get the Austrian chancellor, the Czech prime minister and a change in France, we’ll be the strongest group in the European Council. Then we must also try to become the strongest group in the European Parliament. Now we’re in third place. We’re waiting for the war between Russia and Ukraine to be taken off the agenda, and then it will be easier to work with the European Conservatives and Reformists: our two groups will be in agreement on migration and the Green Deal. Then, if the AfD gains legitimacy in Germany, we can start thinking about how to extend cooperation further. We’ll also have to bring in some parties from the EPP [European People’s Party] who are tired of that organisation betraying its own voters and forming coalitions with the Left. This will create the necessary majority on the right.
Zoltán Szalai: How does the leader of the AfD see what’s in prospect in Germany? Can your party win the elections?
Alice Weidel: Although there’s only a week and a half left, that’s still an open question. We’re firmly placed as the second strongest force, and on an upward trend. People in Germany want political change. The only reason that the CDU–CSU is the strongest force is that it’s copied our programme in its entirety. They’re campaigning on AfD platform points, even though they’ve rejected these same points put forward by us in Parliament over the past seven years. What Friedrich Merz is doing is simply deceiving the electorate. He’s concealing from his own voters the fact that he’ll never be able to carry through his promises in coalition with Alliance ’90/The Greens and the Social Democratic Party of Germany – because the parliamentary situation means that he’ll need two coalition partners, and the firewall [against cooperation with the AfD] means that those partners will be the Greens and the Social Democrats. This is totally undemocratic. You cannot exclude millions of voters. This happened once before, and we’re glad to have said goodbye to communism. And now the party that for sixteen years gave us the greenest and most left-wing chancellor takes a stand, and puts up a firewall against a libertarian conservative force. The voters will punish it. If the CDU does not cooperate with the AfD, which it has ruled out, then with the Greens and the Social Democrats it will not be able to deliver on its promises. I don’t think we’ll have to wait four years: there will be an unstable coalition for a year or two, and then new elections. And then the AfD will be in government. We’ll continue to strengthen, and perhaps we’ll overtake the CDU. We’re patient. I’ve been working in this sphere for eleven years, and before that I wasn’t a member of any other party. I became a politician in the first place because of my dissatisfaction with Angela Merkel. That was because she told people that there was no alternative to the policies she represented. I knew then that there was a big problem.
Viktor Orbán: This is interesting. I also thought that I didn’t want to live in a country where there’s no alternative. That’s why we founded our radical anti-communist resistance movement in 1988, and that’s what got us into politics. At that time we used the word “liberal”, but that word was destroyed, was compromised, by the Left, and so now we use the word “freedom” instead. In politics I fight for freedom, which is why we understand each other so easily.
Roger Köppel: Viktor Orbán has a very good relationship with the US president, who’s stirring up the world around us. How will he change the European Union?
Viktor Orbán: Any comparison should be treated with caution. In terms of size and culture, America is in another dimension. It grew out of Europe, but then developed away from us. What works there culturally might not work here in Europe. But we can always count on President Donald Trump in one respect: he’s a freedom fighter. He wants to break down the structures that limit freedom on a global scale. The best example of this is the current scandal, which is revealing how left-wing, liberal, globalist organisations have been financed with US government money. In Europe, including in Hungary, a whole network has been maintained with US money to suppress freedom fighters like us – and to get a liberal, left-wing government in Hungary. And now he’s fighting against that. Donald Trump isn’t our saviour, but our brother-in-arms. The battle he’s fighting there is the same as the one we’re fighting here. But Trump knows what he wants, and the European Union doesn’t. Instead of approaching the Americans with offers a long time ago, we’ve been sitting here like startled rabbits waiting for the fox to come along and for something bad to happen to us. If the Americans want to improve the EU–US trade balance, how do we imagine this happening? We should be making offers and inviting them to negotiate. But we’re sitting like rabbits and waiting for the great American president to do something. Paralysis, cowardice and a bad bureaucratic mentality hold sway, and if we don’t break out of this, we’ll lose the US–European tariff disputes. And that won’t be the Americans’ fault, but ours.
Zoltán Szalai: An important question, especially for us in a country neighbouring Ukraine: When will the war end? How will Donald Trump end it?
Viktor Orbán: Donald Trump will definitely change the world in five ways. The first will be in how one thinks about migration. The new position is clear: migration is bad and must be stopped, and illegal migration is the worst thing. This is a big shift, and the opposite of what globalists and liberals say. The second way will be in how one thinks about war and peace. Donald Trump wants peace. Everyone else here in Europe, except Hungary, wants to defeat the Russians – which is crazy. The third is our view of energy and the whole Green Deal. Trump says that in green policy you can’t ignore economic considerations and you can’t pursue green policy which runs counter to economic reason. The fourth is that the US president is ending the mockery of Christianity. In the Western world it has become customary for Christianity to be mocked and denigrated, and for those belonging to Christian communities to be labelled as medieval. Trump, on the other hand, has made it clear that being a Christian is something of value, a great and honourable thing. This is also a big change. And finally, fifth, the US president will bring back free speech in place of political correctness.
Alice Weidel: Viktor Orbán is right to say that what makes us different is that Donald Trump knows what he wants. He puts the national interest first, while we in Europe don’t know where we want to go. We have no leadership. We need strong, self-aware, sovereign nations that can make sensible decisions for their own countries. This includes a healthy economy. Without prosperity you can’t make the right decisions, and industry as a whole will go bust. In Germany the main problem is that in energy policy we’ve become a wrong-way driver. We’re the only industrialised country to have given up nuclear power, and because of the ideological Green Deal we have the highest energy prices. What’s happening is absolute madness. By the way, we’re also exasperating our neighbours, because we’re wrecking the European electricity market and thus the whole of industry, which is energy-intensive. We’ve lost our economic competitiveness. In an AfD-led government, we’ll immediately set about remedying the situation: from day one we’ll expand energy supply, we’ll bring nuclear power back on stream, we’ll reverse divestment from coal, and we’ll source gas and oil from where it is cheapest – from Russia if necessary. And we’ll amend taxes, taking the burden off working people. Twenty-five percent income tax should be enough, and the aim is to halve taxes. We’ll drastically cut taxes on energy and abolish carbon taxes, which are hitting businesses and households hard. And on the migration issue we’ll simply comply with the law: we’ll close and control our borders, refuse entry to illegal immigrants, and consistently expel those already in our country.
Roger Köppel: The European Union is on the brink of what even Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, has described as an existential crisis. What do you hope will get Europe moving upwards again?
Alice Weidel: My first task is to get my country – the Federal Republic of Germany, which I love and which I want to serve – back on its feet, and to restore order; because everything has been in chaos for the last twenty years. I want the Germans to be able to live normally again, to have safe streets, for people to be able start families and build their livelihoods. This is how I grew up in the 1990s, and I didn’t lack anything. This was dismantled within a few years. I come from the middle class, and in Germany that class no longer exists. Only the AfD can save our country. The other European states are suffering from similar problems, and Viktor Orbán is leading the way in finding solutions. He is an idol for us, and for me personally.
Viktor Orbán: I see no ray of light on the European horizon. But I’m extremely optimistic about Hungary. The European Union is fighting for survival. It’s highly doubtful whether it can survive. If it doesn’t make significant changes to its economic, energy and migration policies, it will fall apart. The window of opportunity to save it is extremely narrow, and is closing. Time is short. As the leader of a country of ten million people, it’s clear that Hungary cannot save the European Union. Germany and France could, but at the moment I don’t see the capacity for that. Therefore, as a Hungarian, I’m focusing on how we Hungarians can be successful and strong.