Viktor Orbán: Brussels wants to put a puppet government in our place

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán claimed in a speech on Wednesday that the European Union seeks to topple his government and install a puppet regime in the Central European country, an escalation of open hostility toward the bloc by the member considered Russia’s closest ally.

His controversial comments came during his keynote speech at an event commemorating the 1956 armed uprising against Soviet repression that began in the capital and spread across Hungary before being crushed by the Red Army.

After paying tribute to the “heroes” of the 1956 revolution and drawing parallels with the recent fight against the Danube floods that have hit Hungary, the prime minister turned his attention to the EU and the war in Ukraine.

“That is why they announced in Brussels that they will get rid of Hungary’s national government,” Orbán told the crowd in Budapest. “They also announced that they wanted to hang a Brussels puppet government around the country’s neck.”

Officials in the EU have given no public response to the remarks at this time.

The bloc and the central European country have been at loggerheads on support for Kyiv in its two and a half years long war against Russia on its soil.

Hungary has routinely blocked, delayed or watered down EU efforts to extend assistance to Ukraine and sanction Russia, and taken an adversarial posture toward Kyiv while growing closer to Moscow.

However, in an equally unsubstantiated statement, Orbán asserted that the EU plans to allow Ukrainian soldiers to station in Hungary after a future victory. “We Hungarians would wake up one morning to find that Slavic soldiers from the east were again stationed on the territory of Hungary.”

Trouble with Brussels rumbles on

The Hungarian authorities recently caused consternation in Brussels when they threatened to bus hundreds of migrants from the Hungarian border to the Belgian capital in protest at the EU’s migration laws.

Orbán’s government had previously been fined €200 million by the European Court of Justice for “unprecedented and exceptionally serious breach of EU law” because of the country’s strong restrictions on the right to asylum.

The prime minister’s speech comes as leaders from around the world meet in Moscow for the BRICs conference, which the Kremlin hopes to use to bolster its trade ties and standing on the world stage.

It is not the first time that the Hungarian premier has used the event to draw parallels between past occupying forces like the Soviet Union and Ottoman Empire and the EU today.

However, it is the first time in years that Orbán has commemorated the event in the capital, usually favouring locations in the countryside, his Fidesz party’s heartlands.