Viktor Orbán held a speech on Saturday at Madrid's Saint Paul University entitled "Hope and a Christian Response to the Crisis". Communiqué.

"The Spanish, like the Hungarians, are a people who value freedom, who look back at their own history with pride, and who will not allow the work with which their grandfathers rebuilt their homeland after the civil war be put at risk once again by bureaucrats and financial speculators" – the Hungarian Prime Minister said. "People who are committed to Christian traditions, both laics and clerics, Catholics and Protestants alike, are connected by a common feeling: dutiful responsibility. In Europe today, such forms of human cohabitation have become open to question as the nation and the family", warned the Prime Minister, adding that "Similarly, the true and original object of work and credit have become uncertain in economic life." With regard to the issue of credit Viktor Orbán explained that "A Europe that professes Christian values would perhaps not have allowed people to waste away their family's future by taking on loans."

On the subject of austerity measures, he said that "In the long term, it is neither in the interests of the people, governments or lenders, because if order is loosened as a result of such measures, social stability is reduced and the framework of economic life becomes uncertain, then who will there be to work for each of those borrowed Euros?" With reference to the new Fundamental Law of Hungary, he told his audience that "We have chosen the first line of our National Prayer as the first sentence of our National Credo: 'Lord God, Bless the Hungarians!' Our "sin" is that in the 21st century we have dared to include in our constitution the fact that faith, the church, the nation and the family belong not to our past but to our future. What we believe is this: politics based on Christian values will, for the umpteenth time during the course of history, once again renew Europe", the Prime Minister stated.

The Prime Minister's speech was listened to by several hundred people at the venue on large screens, and by some three thousand people online. After his speech, Viktor Orbán also took time to reply to several questions from the audience.

(Prime Minister's Office)