Viktor Orbán: The overhead battle is eternal

The overhead battle is eternal and it will not be any different in the upcoming election, said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Wednesday in Budapest, at the 15-year anniversary event of the Viewpoint Institute.

At the event held at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Prime Minister said: "we are the ones who reduced the overhead, we want to keep it low". And there are those who say that this is unreasonable, that the market should be allowed to regulate this issue, that people will consume less and "say the liberal textbooks". If this becomes a political exercise or a government activity, the result will be an increase in the cost of living, Viktor Orbán pointed out.

The prime minister also spoke about how the Nézőpont Institute, founded in 2006, used to judge the expected final result well in the light of the last three elections. He added: in order to achieve a large-scale electoral success, analysis is first needed, then planning, and then work, "the hard work comes", and at the end the result will be announced. For a serious election victory, and even more so for successive election victories, a lot of work has to be done. "Victory is not blown by the wind", he said, two-thirds of the time one does not happen by accident, especially not two or three times in a row.

The prime minister called the period after the 2006 autumn speech the age of lies. He emphasized: in those years, they consciously and coordinatedly "led an entire country", it was possible to win an election by hiding and falsifying the budget figures, so that the people would not reveal to the voters what the real situation was.

Quoting George Orwell, the prime minister said: speaking the truth in the age of lies is considered a revolutionary act. Thus, if you think about the establishment of the Viewpoint Institute in 2006, you can easily classify the institute as a revolutionary organization. Nézőpont was created as an institution that dared to say that "two and two make four" even when everyone was shouting the opposite, he said. Viktor Orbán emphasized: they cannot help but be grateful to the Nézőpont Institute for helping to put an end to the "age of lies".

He explained: political analysis as a profession was in a rather rudimentary state in Hungary in 2006, and from there they reached the point where analytical and research work, which can be said to be structured according to Western European standards, is now underway.

He said that if there is a profession that requires a distance, an objective point of view free from personal bias, which informs us about "in which direction our decisions take the country's chariot, not by themselves, but as a whole", then it is definitely the profession of politicians. We need a background - such is the Viewpoint Institute - whose mission is to look at this work impartially, with the demands of reality and the tools of science, he explained.

He noted: Nézőpont was perhaps the first Hungarian institute that was thoughtfully and consciously established in Hungary on the model of Western think-tanks.

The Prime Minister recalled: 15 years have passed since the establishment of Nezőpont, and "we were in government for 12 of those years". The Nézőpont Institute helped them to get to know people's opinions, and it is also necessary to develop policy proposals, "we also thank them with respect," he said, adding: he is also grateful for the third thing, the insightful analysis of media relations.

He believed that it is not simply useful if such institutes exist in a country, but it is inevitable in the case of a free country. "There is no national sovereignty if there are no analytical research companies in national hands that prepare political decisions," he declared. He added: it is important that there are those who describe the world from the Hungarian point of view and based on Hungarian interests.

Source: Magyar Hírlap

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