What is at stake now in the elections is not whether Hungary “should go forward or backward,” but peace or war, prime minister Viktor Orban spoke about this in an interview published on the Internet portal Origo on Thursday. The Prime Minister said the Hungarian Left poses a serious threat to peace, while Fidesz is the guarantee of peace. He also said after the elections “the data affair” will have to be looked into and evaluated also from the viewpoint of national security.

According to the prime minister, the upcoming election will be a strange one because in the meantime the stakes have changed. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. Orban pointed out that when the campaign began and the opposition held their preliminary elections, it became clear that what was at stake in the elections was whether the failed past from before 2010 would return or “we can go forward”.

However, in the very midst of the campaign a war erupted. Not like the second round of the Yugoslav Wars in 1999 which was bloody and cruel, but a clash between states smaller than Hungary. Now Ukraine, a country of 40 million and Russia, a country of 140 million are at war, and additionally, one of them is a nuclear power. An unprecedented event disrupted the campaign, the prime minister explained.

Orban also insists despite all the troubles, “today we can feel safe because while Russia is a nuclear power and there is no doubt about its strength, NATO is stronger. There is a war right next door to us in which a world power is taking part, but if this world power wanted to cross the borders of Ukraine, it would crash into the wall of NATO, and that will defend us”, he stressed.

Regarding last week’s NATO and EU summits, Orban said at these meetings he saw something he had never seen before: strategic alternatives competed with each other. Evidently, a country group came into being which would like NATO to become involved in this conflict as much as possible, and rather than seeing a Ukraine-Russia war, they see Russian aggression at this time against Ukraine, but later against NATO’s world, and they believe that involvement in this war is inevitable.

The second position is ours; according to this, NATO should not send weapons and soldiers to this conflict. “Our position is the majority position at present, and therefore NATO decided not to take part in this military conflict: it will not send soldiers, it will not send weapons,” the prime minister said.