In his speech at the 30th Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp this weekend, Viktor Orbán put a great emphasis on the word „illiberal”, a term he coined in his 2014 speech. Ever since then, this word has been used by liberals to attack him, so in his speech at Tusványos, he shed some light on why this word actually holds no negative connotations.

The fact of the matter according to PM Orbán is that liberals defined the terms so that democracy can only be liberal. However, nothing can be further from the truth. As the Hungarian leader said, the essence of illiberal democracy is Christian liberty. What is also important to emphasize is that Christian democracy cannot possibly be liberal.

According to Viktor Orbán, liberalism teaches that you can only be free once you have liberated yourself from everything that binds you somehow. Ont he other hand, illiberalism puts the common good first, which is why the illiberal is willing to protects border and the nation’s culture.

Once liberal democracy decided to abandon its Christian foundations, it ceased to be viable. The irony here is that liberal democracy can exist in only those parts of the world where Christian culture existed before, said Orbán.

Liberalism used to be a noble ideology when it protected individual freedom and private property, today however, it has deteriorated. Liberalism has questioned gender identity and completely devalued religious and national identities. This is the path of Europe right now, as it has been for the past 20-30 years.

In the liberal world, society is nothing more but individuals competing against each other. The illiberal (or national) stance states that the nation is a culturally and historically defined community, the members of which must be protected.

As the PM stated: the goal of the Hungarian government now is to turn against liberal internationalism, which claims that its program can only be true if it is true everywhere and everyone accepts it.