‘Ukraine is losing this war, indeed has likely lost it, and Washington is looking for a scapegoat for its colossal strategic failure. Viktor Orbán, who was right about this war from the beginning, is that scapegoat. If Harris wins in November, we can expect a narrative coming out of Washington saying that Ukraine and its allies would have prevailed if it had not been for Hungary stabbing Ukraine in the back.’
‘For those whose hearts beat on both sides of the Atlantic, the more productive consideration is what this election signifies for U.S.–Poland relations. Poland, like the United States, is bitterly divided between cosmopolitan urban areas and more conservative and religious exurbs and rural areas. After eight years of single-party Law & Justice rule, Polish conservatives are momentarily weak and banking heavily on a second Trump administration.’
‘From a sovereigntist standpoint, we need a rule-of-law conception that does not concede any authority over domestic affairs to supranational organizations and international bureaucracies. We need to keep an eye on the bigger picture and understand that these discussions are very much related to the future of the European community. Eurocrats instrumentalize courts to promote their federalist agenda through seemingly neutral rulings about the rule of law.’
‘Since the start of the war, 8 million Ukrainians have fled their country; another 3 million have emigrated to Russia. Aside the mass defections, because of Ukraine’s birth rate collapse to the lowest recorded level, Zelenskyy has been unwilling to mobilize men aged between 18 and 25—typically the bulk of any fighting force. The fear is that, since most of these men are childless, should such die or become incapacitated, future demographic prospects would dim further.’
‘Today, the Hungarian capital is part of the ongoing political discussion at the highest levels of American political life—for better or for worse. Hungary is either a symbol of all that is bad in the Western world—that’s how progressives, liberals, and neoconservatives see it; or it’s a plucky resister to globalism, social liberalism, and mass migration, a laboratory for a new kind of right-of-center policymaking.’
During the third panel of the conference some of the renowned experts held that the future will be about a multipolar world the axis of which are non-Western countries, particularly China, while others argued that the 21st century is still American, with the United States remaining the central and most powerful actor.
The first panel discussion of the Geopolitical Summit discussed several aspects of democracy, and how conservatism fits into it in the ‘changing world order’. The panellists agreed that Western liberal elites have in many ways hijacked democracy.
In his keynote speech at the fourth Danube Institute – The Heritage Foundation Geopolitical Summit, Political Director for the Prime Minister of Hungary Balázs Orbán talked about how the current liberal world order is changing, and conservatives now have the chance to not be the ‘losers’ of the new world order. He also stressed the importance of favouring family policies instead of migration for the solution to the demographic challenges; as well as the upcoming presidential election in the US.
‘We’ve looked at other things involving Hungary that have been done through the State Department, like the change in the visa programme, which seemed like it was perhaps punitive. So we tried to get some records from the State Department about that. We filed a lawsuit. But we haven’t been looking at the EU-Hungary relationship. That’s something that is out of the scope of our usual tools, lawsuits and public records requests.’
‘Leaders who carry the banner of nationalism recognize that they need strong administrative, economic, and military incentives to shape their inhabitants into nations. Without this, their task to successfully contend with other states in the international environment would be in vain.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.
