Prime Minister, do you think it is possible that 2025 was the last year of peace for Europe? Yes, that cannot be ruled out.
The very fact that this question can even arise is shocking. We have grown accustomed to peace. The last major European war ended in 1945, and eighty years have passed since then. That is an extremely rare condition in Europe. For a long time, nuclear weapons of mass destruction restrained the nations of the continent from war. Everyone assumed that a European conflict would inevitably escalate into a nuclear world war. That fear worked for eighty years. But now an entirely new world is emerging.
A redistribution of financial, military, and political power is underway, which can ignite war. The war tension palpable in Europe is a consequence of the decline of Western Europe and the European Union. You returned from the EU summit in Brussels a few days ago. Are we closer to peace or farther away from it? We have moved closer to war. Last week in Brussels, all we managed to achieve was to slow the pace at which Europe is drifting into war. Some wanted to accelerate this process to hyper speed, and we succeeded in blocking them. However, the process itself has not stopped. We only prevented its acceleration. Today, there are once again two camps in Europe: a war camp and a peace camp. At the moment, pro-war forces are prevalent. Brussels wants war. Hungary wants peace.
It feels like a Chekhovian situation: weapons keep appearing on the European stage. Rearmament, conscription, preparing public opinion for war, all at once. On the surface, the Ukraine-Russia war appears to pose a threat of escalation, but that is more of a consequence. The real cause is the political, economic, and social decline of Western Europe. This process began in the mid-2000s and was accelerated by poor responses to the financial crisis. Twenty years ago, the economic performance of the European Union and the United States was roughly equal. Today, America is soaring, while Europe is sliding downhill. The continent that once set the global model has, in just a few years, become a ridiculed and nonserious actor.
