Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary held his annual State of the Nation Address on Saturday, 14 February, at the Castle Garden Bazaar in Budapest, Hungary. This year’s address was delivered in tense political times, less than two months before the Hungarian parliamentary election.

The Prime Minister, however, started with a review of the year 2025, before he got to what this year could bring to the nation. He claimed that, with President Donald Trump’s inauguration last January, the United States has ‘exited’ the Russo–Ukrainian war, which—according to the Prime Minister—all European countries with the exception of Hungary have been forced into. He went on to state that this proves that ‘a sovereignist foreign policy is the prerequisite for national independence.’

As for the 2026 Hungarian elections, PM Orbán warned that representatives of the ‘oil business’—by which he referred to Shell executives who have appeared in the leadership circles of the opposition Tisza Party—along with the international banking sector and the Brussels bureaucracy, are seeking to install a puppet government in Budapest that would carry out the instructions of foreign powers without resistance. ‘We will not be an immigrant country, and we will not be a puppet state either!’ the Prime Minister of Hungary declared.

If the Hungarian people let the oil business, the banking sector, and the Brussels elite form the national government in Budapest through Tisza, the big international corporations will siphon money out of Hungary and give a portion to Brussels. The EU would then give that part to Ukraine as war aid, PM Orbán told the audience, and referred to these actors as ‘the tax collectors for Death’.

‘We will not be an immigrant country, and we will not be a puppet state either!’ the Prime Minister of Hungary declared’

According to Viktor Orbán, the stakes of the election are straightforward: either national sovereignty, the utility price reduction programme, and the border fence will be preserved, or a puppet government will take power—one that would dismantle the country’s defences and sacrifice Hungarians’ money to foreign interests.

‘Our real political opponents in Hungary are not Tisza or [the left-wing socialist party] DK, but their masters in Brussels,’ he added.

The Prime Minister went on to state that the EU has already decided that it will join the war by 2030. Thus, this will be the last Hungarian election before the war, and ‘the next government will decide on the matter of war or peace,’ as the speaker put it. He also assured all that while there is a nationalist government in power in Hungary, ‘they cannot take our young to fight in Ukraine.’

On foreign affairs, PM Orbán said that this could be ‘the century of humiliation for Europe,’ as, for the first time in history, the Old Continent will be on the losing side of an industrial revolution.

‘We have to win, because Hungary belongs only to the Hungarians,’ Prime Minister Orbán ended his speech.

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