On May 20 Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was interviewed on the Kossuth Rádió programme “180 Minutes”. Below are excerpts from the official translation of Mr. Orbán’s remarks:

Last September Hungary decided to turn to the European Court. If the Court rules in favour of the Hungarian government — and also the Slovak government, which is party to the suit — this will mean that the referendum will lose some of its meaning, as obviously no decision contrary to the ruling will be adopted in the future.

This is only partly true, because the challenge we have filed with the Court relates to the past. In the past a decision was adopted. We believe that this decision is contrary to European law and the treaties, and that it contains procedural errors. This is why we are contesting it.

It would make the settlement of migrants in Hungary compulsory, up to a certain number. We reject this. This is the past. The future, however, is much more dangerous than this.

The future is not about one specific decision, with which they want to force a certain number of people on us whom they want us to live together with, against our will: it is about setting up a permanent distribution mechanism. This means that if they let in or bring in migrants to Europe on a permanent and ongoing basis — mostly from the Muslim world — they will use a mechanism to distribute them among the Member States. So this is not about a one-off case, but about our future.

Here I do not want to throw statistics about: I suggest that, if they are able to, people should visit some cities in Western Europe, they should walk down a major street and take a look at life over there. If they have memories of those cities from the past, they will see that in the past ten or twenty years life there has changed substantially. And if we allow this, in ten or twenty years we will not recognise Budapest, and we will not recognise our cities. And parents should imagine their children asking them fifteen years from now why this was allowed to happen to our country.

Therefore I believe we must be firm in preserving the country’s culture, we must preserve its security, and we must also preserve its cultural homogeneity. This is an enormous advantage. The fact that we are the way we are is based on the traditions of a thousand years, on principles and day-to-day customs which we continue to uphold and do not question, because for us they are natural. They provide an enormous competitive advantage, and create a sense of cultural homeland which is no longer present in many European cities.

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