‘What will determine whether the situation plays to Hungary’s favour or not will be the ability of its leaders to balance the concerns of its security partners with the benefits it gains from its economic ones. With its society becoming more dependent on cyber infrastructure, what is undeniable is the necessity to protect it from hostile foreign influence and manipulation. Its western allies offer the greatest opportunity to accomplish that but would likely come at the cost of its Chinese-built infrastructure.’
On the margins of the Hungarian PM’s visit to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, Minister of Economic Development Márton Nagy and Gao Weijie, the CEO of Huawei Technologies Hungary and the Western Balkans Region signed a memorandum of understanding, further deepening the strategic cooperation between the Hungarian government and Huawei that began in 2013.
‘Could Biden’s token [of shaking hands only with Orbán when arriving for the NATO group photo in Vilnius], as some experts suspect, have been an invitation to the Hungarian government to hop on board the US geopolitical bandwagon and forget the Chinese and Russian ones?’
Hungary’s goal is to advance to the top ten best-performing countries in the European Union in terms of digital economic and social development by 2030.
Péter Szijjártó stated that one of the main pillars of the government’s foreign economic strategy is the economic relationship with China. ‘Companies like Huawei, which not only invest and create jobs in Hungary but also share technological knowledge and actively support domestic higher education, play the most important role in this,’ he declared.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.