Prime Minister Viktor Orbán compared Hungary’s membership in the European Union to more than four decades of Soviet occupation of his country during a speech on Monday commemorating the anniversary of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet revolution.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán compared Hungary’s membership in the European Union to more than four decades of Soviet occupation of his country during a speech on Monday commemorating the anniversary of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet revolution.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Speaking to a select group of guests in the city of Veszprem, Orbán accused the EU of seeking to strip Hungary of its identity by imposing a model of liberal democracy that he said Hungarians reject.
Brussels, the de facto capital of the EU, employs methods against Hungary that hearken back to the days of Soviet domination by Moscow, he said.
The Oct. 23 national holiday commemorates the beginning of a 1956 popular uprising against Soviet repression that began in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, and spread across the country.
After Hungary’s Stalinist leader was successfully ousted and Soviet troops were forced out of the capital, a directive from Moscow sent the Red Army back into Budapest and brutally suppressed the revolution, killing as many as 3,000 civilians and destroying much of the city.
In recent years, he has used the occasion to draw parallels between the EU’s attempts to bring Hungary into compliance with its rules on corruption and democracy, and the repression the country faced under Soviet occupation in the 20th century.
European leaders, as well as other members of the NATO military alliance such as the United States, expressed concern that Orbán had met with Putin even as an international arrest warrant has been issued against him for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
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