Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker did not hold back in an interview with POLITICO, in which he harshly criticized former US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and gave his unvarnished opinion on Brexit.
At the beginning of the interview, Juncker, of course, defended Joe Biden, who underperformed even by his own standards in last Thursday’s presidential debate. Without having watched the debate by his own admission, Juncker remarked: ‘One can be of a certain age…and do a good job.’ This statement is particularly bizarre because even Biden’s party colleagues found the president’s performance so embarrassing and poor that they have called on him to step aside and make way for another candidate for the presidential race.
In contrast, Juncker said of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, that he has an ‘incomplete mind and flawed reasoning’. Juncker also suggested that Trump has always viewed the European Union as an alliance ‘invented by the Europeans against the United States’. The former Commission President added that in his view Trump is utterly untrustworthy, which is why he has no confidence that Trump will be able to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, as he has promised, if elected president.
Juncker versus Orbán — A Familiar Matchup
Juncker then said that Orbán aims to create ‘maximum discomfort’ for the new European Parliament with the new right-wing alliance Patriots for Europe, founded last Sunday by the Hungarian PM, Herbert Kickl, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), and former Czech Prime Minister and ANO party President Andrej Babiš. He added that Budapest’s six-month presidency of the Council of the EU, which kicked off this week, is
unlikely to achieve much if it played the disruptor.
‘The influence of a presidency is large when it wants to advance things; it is not very large when it wants to block them,’ he said.
Juncker led the European Commission between 2014 and 2019, and his relationship with Viktor Orbán was far from smooth. It was during this period that Orbán fought his first major battle with Brussels, particularly during the 2015 migration crisis. Hungary’s response to the arrival of millions of migrants, closing its borders, was markedly different from the response advocated by Brussels. This created significant tensions between the EU institutions and Budapest, with Juncker and Orbán frequently at odds. Juncker used every legal and political tool at the Commission’s disposal to put pressure on the Hungarian prime minister. Following his recent talks with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome, Orbán recalled that the root of Europe’s current problems is that Jean-Claude Juncker tried to turn the then-politically neutral Commission into a political body after 2014.
When it comes to the relationship between Juncker and Orbán, the famous video footage of Juncker greeting Orbán with the phrase ‘Hello, Dictator!’ before the 2015 EU summit in Riga is inescapable. The former Commission President spoke about the incident just last month in an interview with Czech Lidové Noviny. He explained that he did not know the microphones were on, which is why he greeted the Hungarian prime minister in that manner. ‘Orbán and I often teased each other like that because we had a good personal relationship. For me, Orbán is not a dictator, but the leader of an authoritarian form of government,’ Juncker said.
In the POLITICO interview Juncker also spoke about Brexit. Britain is ‘currently discovering the consequences of its vote’ to leave the bloc in 2016, ‘and the consequences correspond exactly to what we told them they’d be,’ said Juncker, who led the Brexit talks along with the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier. Juncker remarked that the UK’s chances of re-joining the EU’s single market are slim, but perhaps it could do so ‘in a century or two’.
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