Orban: They Tell Us Russian Gas is Bad But Not How To Replace It

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives to attend an informal summit of the Eur
MICHAL CIZEK/AFP via Getty Images
Chris Tomlinson

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has criticised those clamouring to scrap Russian gas, saying it’s easy to make such calls without having a plan to replace that lost energy with an affordable, reliable substitute.

Prime Minister Orbán made his comments on his recently created Twitter account on Wednesday saying, “They tell me Russian gas is bad. They tell me we should stop buying it. But nobody tells us how to replace Russian gas.”

“Not in five years, but tomorrow. We need to run our economy, it’s as simple as that,” the Hungarian leader added.

Hungary has been criticised by key powers in the European Union for continuing purchases of Russian gas, with individuals among them including German Green Party MEP Daniel Freund, who criticised the announcement of a Hungarian deal with Russian energy giant Gazprom in late August.

“Orbán’s political survival depends on gas shipments from Putin. Keep that in mind the next time the Hungarian Prime Minister enters the EU Council building,” Freund wrote.

Prime Minister Orbán has directed his own criticism of European Green parties, stating last month that Europeans needed to fight “fundamentalist” Greens blocking nuclear, coal and gas energy.

“[W]e have to fight the fundamentalist greens and the bureaucrats involved in geopolitical games,” he said and added, “They have to be convinced, and this argument is a real fight, so that different energy sources – coal, nuclear, gas – are not excluded [as] possibilities.”

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has also wanted that proposals to place a cap on the price of gas could lead to a shutdown of gas supplies from Russia.

“We are not ready to allow anybody to make Hungarian people pay price for the war. It will be physically impossible [for us] to buy enough oil to operate our country and our economy,” Szijjarto said.

Hungary receives around 80 power cent of its natural gas from Russian sources and also acts as a transit country for Russian natural gas to other countries in the European Union.

However, Prime Minister Orbán gave a speech earlier this month stating that Hungary would be ending its excessive reliance on Russian gas by the end of this year due to planned cooperation with Romania and called for more work to be done to establish more natural gas routes in the Balkans to import energy from Africa.

 

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.

 

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