Prime Minister Viktor Orbán inaugurated the European Political Community (EPC) summit in Budapest, highlighting the unprecedented diplomatic scale of the event in Hungary’s history. He underscored the security, migration, and economic challenges Europe faces, as well as the significance of the US presidential election for transatlantic relations.
‘Hungarians had hoped that the newly formed European Parliament would finally move past the practice of stigmatizing those whose democratically elected positions differ from the Brussels mainstream. Instead, the Brussels elite decided to welcome the election results with blatant anti-democratic tactics, dismissing the political significance and representation of millions of European citizens…The cordon sanitaire is not just an attack on millions of European voters—it is an assault on European democracy and the rule of law.’
Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris got herself into an embarrassing scandal, after conservative activist and writer Chris Rufo revealed that she had included virtually unedited passages from uncredited sources, including the open online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Rufo’s accusations of plagiarism led to the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay earlier this year.
Republican Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor and Governor of California, took 49 out of the 50 states in the 1984 election, netting him an all-time record of 525 electoral votes. During his first term in office he managed to solve the two crises plaguing his predecessor Jimmy Carter’s administration: high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis.
John Tsagronis and Michelle Watson, the founders of the Corporate Statecraft programme at the Institute of World Politics, were among the speakers and panellists of the 4th Danube–Heritage Geopolitical Summit this September, when they graciously sat down with Hungarian Conservative for an interview.
‘The gradual diminishing of Europe’s importance in the eyes of the successive US administrations in the twenty-first century has been arrested by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and weakened the “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia for the time being: emergencies have cropped up elsewhere. As Joseph Stalin may be said to have been one of the “founding fathers” of NATO, so may Vladimir Putin be seen in a similar role with regard to the revival of NATO, and closer US–EU cooperation.’
At the annual Kötcse gathering of conservative political and cultural elites Viktor Orbán shared that an action plan has been drafted for a ‘peace budget’ that will involve wage hikes, as well as more government support for families and for businesses.
‘Just as liberalism did not succeed in transforming people after socialism, neither did the competing anti-liberal, post-Christian, nihilistic trends. The solution is certainly not political or movement-based: those had already failed by the middle of the twentieth century.’
Within hours of the announcement of Kamala Harris picking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the American news site POLITICO published an article comparing Governor Walz’s views of PM Orbán of Hungary to that of Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Vice Presidental candidate on the Republican side.
Balázs Orbán emphasized at a party political roundtable discussion on Thursday at the 33rd Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp that peace advocates will eventually become the majority in Europe, stating that ‘time is on their side’.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.