Hungary should follow its own path, says PM on Lakitelek anniversary
30 September 2012
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called it a historic merit of the Lakitelek meeting of intellectuals in 1987 that participants were determined to stick to their goals.
Now, 25 years later there are still many who "want to persuade us to accept that others tell us who we are and how we should live," Orban told a commemoration in Lakitelek, central Hungary, on Saturday.
The 1987 meeting was a milestone in a political regime change that followed in 1989-90.
Orban said that those fighting for the prosperity of the nation would only succeed if they adopted the mentality of those who engineered the regime change.
It is no longer enough "to copy the West" to succeed, and those who do it will only plunge deeper into crisis, he said.
Although Hungary "forms part of western culture and the European economy," it can only succeed if it follows its own path, Orban said, noting that the "citizens of the European Union are following 28 paths".
Hungary has to choose a path of its own, not the path of those who caused the crisis and "obviously failed to cope with it."
The Lakitelek meeting took place on September 27, 1987, with 181 politicians, reform-minded economists and opposition intellectuals in attendance.
Most speeches focused on the need for reforms and a way out of the social crisis, and set the aim of the broadest-possible social cooperation.
The participants declared that dictatorial socialism was a blind alley and demanded pluralism and, indirectly, a multi-party system.
Approving a declaration, the participants called for cooperation between progressive social forces, freedom of the press, and forums for expounding independent views and programmes.
On Saturday morning, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán received President of Poland Andrzej Duda in Parliament.
In answer to questions from foreign journalists in Brussels on Friday, the second day of the summit of the European Union’s heads of state and government, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that Hungary does not like double standards, and therefore does not support them being applied to anyone, including Poland.
At a press conference in Brussels on Friday afternoon, in which he evaluated the agreement between the European Union and Turkey, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that Hungarian diplomacy has achieved its goals.