At an event in Sátoraljaújhely on Tuesday marking the Hungarian Day of National Cohesion, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that Hungary wants to cooperate with its neighbours, and whoever cooperates with it will also benefit.
The Prime Minister said that, ninety-nine years after the Treaty of Trianon, “we Hungarians can boldly stand tall: we have endured!”
At the Rákóczi Camp and Event Centre owned by the Rákóczi Association, the Prime Minister said that “we are here in the centre of Europe, despite dismemberment, wars and dictatorships”.
Mr. Orbán stressed that Hungarians have not only survived this period, but have formed what is now the most populous nation in the Carpathian Basin.
He continued: “Day by day our economic, cultural and military strength is visibly growing. The time has come for us to use it. The only question is for what purpose.” He said that the answer of his government is that this strength must be used to promote common bonds between Central European peoples.
He declared that “One hundred years of Hungarian solitude has come to an end […] and now we have passed many milestones on the road that we started out on thirty years ago, when escaping from the Soviet Union.”
He added that nine years ago a decision was made for the darkest day in the history of the Hungarian nation to not only fill people with grief, but also with strength, and “to raise us to unity”.
With reference to Trianon, he said that what was then unjust will remain so until the end of time, because time heals wounds, but not “amputation”. In the time that has passed, he continued, nothing has changed the fact that what happened ninety-nine years ago was not a negotiation, but a diktat: a punishment for losing the war.
Behind the decision, he said, the superiority of the victors was in no way derived from morality, but only from power: millions of people were punished for answering the call of their homeland, and they were not to blame for having to fight in a war in which no side was good and just. The Prime Minister added that the victors’ decisions were arrogant, they punished entire nations, and did not sow the seeds of freedom or peace in Europe, but those of renewed enmity, dictatorships and further wars.
Mr. Orbán said that “We were subjected to the hammer blows of National Socialism, immediately followed by those of communism – for which the peace diktat prepared the soil.” He added that after the Second World War the whole of Central Europe was “thrown to” the Soviet Union and the communist world order.
The Prime Minister told his audience of young people who had gathered at the camp that “wherever you have come from, here in Hungary you are at home: Hungary is your home also.”
He added that “we here are bound together by being the joint inheritors of the world-changing achievements of Hungarians.”
The Prime Minister also extolled Ferenc Rákóczi II, noting that to this day Hungarians are bound this commandment: “Trusting in the help of God, to fight and work for a free and Hungarian homeland.”
Mr. Orbán concluded his address with these words: “Together we shall once more be strong, successful and victorious!”
In his address to the around one thousand young people who had come from all parts of the Carpathian Basin and the world as a whole, Csongor Csáky, President of the Rákóczi Association, said that their goal is to rebuild and rebind the links between members of the wider Hungarian nation, and that the Association is the building block of Hungary’s policy for Hungarian communities abroad.
Referring to the Association’s work, he mentioned that with the assistance of a call for applications from the Rákóczi Association, 2,500 young people had been able to attend the previous weekend’s Holy Mass said by Pope Francis in Csíksomlyó/Șumuleu Ciuc.
Speaking about the event in Sátoraljaújhely marking the Day of National Cohesion, Mr. Csáky said that “we are celebrating cohesion here in the land of Rákóczi”.