Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Interview on Kossuth Radio's "180 Minutes" Programme

Gábor István Kiss: The urns will be sealed in exactly 227 hours and 25 minutes' time, so we can perhaps say that this is what remains of the current government term. We are holding a brief review of the past four years with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who I have sitting next to me here. Good morning!

Viktor Orbán: My sincere greetings to all your listeners.

GIK: I have tried to search for the term or the area that you have spoken the most about both here in the studio and in other places, and I also put the most questions to you with regard to this topic, which is undoubtedly job creation. It is also undeniable that we have seen positive figures in this area. We can perhaps state with regard to the past four years that the idea that if there is work there is everything has been one of the central principles not just for you, but also for the members of the cabinet.

VO: What's more, we made a clear undertaking in 2010. We declared that we would like to and would create one million jobs over a period of ten years; four years have passed and we have created somewhat more than 250 thousand, which in proportion to time is somewhat less, but it is more than hoped; in 2010, nobody would have believed that the Hungarian economy, the Hungarian people and the Hungarian Government could be capable of achieving this together. We are living in a time of crisis here in Europe, which is our most important export market; Europe is still struggling with a serious economic crisis and under such conditions this is a more than acceptable result within the time available, and it is a source of hope that we will succeed in creating those one million new jobs.

GIK: So this is one quarter of the promised and planned number. When will we reach one million?

VO: We said over ten years, but I think we are permitted to achieve the goal somewhat earlier. But nobody can tell you the answer to that now, because we cannot see that clearly into the future. We see the outlines, but not the details.

GIK: Indeed, if someone views their own life as trying to find a way to get ahead, then they will most certainly find some kind of work that has purpose, meaning and is valued, nobody can argue with that. But it would have been nice if over these past four years natural job creation would also have occurred thanks to enterprises, if new, greenfield, taxpaying jobs were created rather than only artificial processes being able to create jobs. I'm talking about the public work programme.

VO: Yes, but the reason you think that is because you're living according to a different philosophical system than I am. I have never believed in this separation of natural and non-natural; work is work. The point of work is that someone has to do it, they have to do it well and they receive a certain remuneration, a salary, in exchange for doing a good job. As I see the state of Hungarian society, we cannot behave as if we started from scratch in 2010: every nation carries on its back what it has inherited from the past. There is in Hungary, and will continue to be in the foreseeable future, a significant segment of the population who, because of their level of education, because of their place of birth, where they live, or the disadvantaged nature of the region in which they live, cannot be provided job opportunities by the market, by enterprises and by the profit-orientated economy, and this was also the case ten years ago. The question is, how does a government react to this? Our predecessors said that since the market cannot create enough jobs, we will send people benefit payments and the invisible hand of the market will sort this problem out too at some point in the future. I do not believe in that. My belief is that in places where the market is unable to provide work and where there exists a workforce, a potential workforce that is incapable of entering the job market because it is under qualified, has been unemployed for a long time and/or lives in an unfavourable area with regard to job creation, the state must step in – this is the natural reaction, I think. It is not unnatural and not artificial. It is perfectly natural that the state must create job opportunities.

GIK: We will move on to the issue of education soon, and the question of what's my degree worth, what's my professional training worth, but let's stick with the issue of what is my salary worth for the moment, or rather another question first. We are talking about those sections of the population – and we are talking about millions of people – who are balancing on the edge of the poverty line, and according to certain polls we are talking about 3 million people here, who live from one month to the other and whose salaries, even if they are employed, are hardly enough to maintain them until the end of the month. This number hasn't decreased over these past four years; it hasn't fallen in other European countries, and it hasn't fallen here in Hungary either.

VO: There is debate on this issue, but let's leave it to the people to decide, because they can better assess what has happened with them over the past four years, and if they believe that their situation has not improved then they are unlikely to do us the honour of placing their confidence in us. Nevertheless, I hope that this is what will happen. Unemployed people used to get 28,500 forints in unemployment benefit, and now the average wage for public work is around 70 thousand forints and is under no circumstances less than 40-50 thousand forints. And so, in the work-based society that we are constructing, even families who are in the greatest difficulties are receiving at least double the income through public work than they would on benefits. Not to mention the fact that within the framework of the Job Protection Action Plan we have succeeded in protecting the jobs of some 700-800 thousand people, so my view on this, on the issue you put forward, is that we cannot step forward from the world of low salaries into the world of high salaries from one day to the next. The important thing is that we begin moving towards a state of affairs whereby we cannot merely get by through working, but we can also get ahead.

GIK: It isn't the level of wages that I am calling these past four years to account because of, but the real value of wages, because according to statistics, apart from those with the highest incomes, real income has decreased for practically everyone.

VO: Yes, but this does not correspond to reality. And in fact if I look at 2013 then exactly the opposite tendency has begun, because the real value of earnings is primarily determined by the level of inflation, and since the reduction of utility prices has led to savings of 20 percent, and the third phase of cuts is underway, we can safely say that 2013 was a turning point and we have entered an era in which more and more of the income that people earn through working stays in their pockets.

GIK: Yes, and the average person's reply to that is that this is all true and can see from the bills that my household costs have fallen, but how much am I paying for fuel, how much am I paying for bread, how much am I paying for clothing; these things are being sold to me at Western European prices while I'm earning an Eastern European salary.

VO: That's right, but the world is such an unfair place. I would also like everything to cost half as much as it does, but the economy has its laws, and so one has to assess one's own opportunities, what can one achieve, and we are attempting to construct an economy that results in full employment and are repelling the attempts of the monopolies and cartels to pull a major part of people's earnings out of their pockets in the form of utility charges, and so we are reducing utility prices and attempting to create an economy in which there is growth, because where there is growth there is a chance that salaries will increase. This is what we have been able to achieve through blood sweat and tears during these past years. Nobody can say that life is easy in Hungary, because everyone has eyes, but that what we are doing makes sense and is achieving results is something that it is perhaps worth saying and can be stated in Hungary today.

GIK: You toppled two important elements of public consensus with your very first measures and statements after coming to office. One piece of public consensus regarding the fact that the state should not interfere in the free market, and a piece of public consensus with regard to the role of the state in public policy on conforming to outside influences, which was a determining factor in the years leading up to 2010. Your critics say that these measures have gained you more enemies than friends.

VO: It is important that one has friends, but perhaps the best thing is if the voters are your friends. I have done my best to practice politics that are good for the Hungarian people. There was no clause in my contract that said that the big international companies have to be happy too, and it also wasn’t in my contract that banks should continue to be able to take home extra profits. But what was clearly included in my contract was that we must facilitate and support the lives of the Hungarian people, and so if I have perhaps lost a few foreign friends I have instead of them gained a few million Hungarian friends, and that is a good deal, I think.

GIK: And you had no qualms about manifestly reorganising large systems professing that the two-thirds majority was to all intents and purposes a mandate for doing so. You have said on many occasions in this studio that you were entrusted with reorganising these systems, which in your opinion were not working properly before 2010. Let's speak a little about these large systems in absolutely everyday terms. So, you're telling me that the quality of education and of healthcare services will improve because the state has entered this market and set foot in these fields, to which what I say is that the important thing isn't whether the hospital is state-owned or not, but whether the plaster is peeling and whether or not there are enough doctors.

VO: Yes, that's very important, but it is at least as important that the hospital doesn't go bankrupt, because if the hospital closes then having enough doctors and no peeling plaster will not be much use. The situation in 2010 was that our hospitals were on the edge of bankruptcy, because the costs of maintenance were born by local authorities and they received no money in return from the socialist government for eight long years, and as a result almost every hospital and almost every local government that had a hospital to maintain were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. So our first task was to save these institutions. You can't run good hospitals while they are balancing on the border between existence and doom. And so we said that we would put this state of affairs in order, and that it should be those who in fact run the hospital who should be responsible. And since local governments don't have enough of their own resources to do so it is the responsibility of the state to provide money, but accordingly it is also the responsibility of the state to guarantee the cost effectiveness of the utilisation of those resources and the quality of healthcare. And this is the direction we began moving in. Nobody in Hungary would dream of saying that the state of public healthcare in Hungary can be compared with that of German or Austria, we are still far from that and still have a lot of work to do to achieve that.

GIK: And in fact, unfortunately, the statistics for the most common illnesses don't reinforce that either. Education. Here too, if we look at figures for the number of graduates and for the value of university degrees and vocational qualifications, although I wouldn't say that it was fair to compare them to the Austrian or German figures, but even our competitiveness is questionable.

VO: It depends what section of the Hungarian education system you look at. Where I am seeing promising signs is in the field of vocational training; we still have a lot of work to do there too, but there are promising signs. There are all sorts of professional and trade competitions in which our young professionals also regularly take part and they usually achieve excellent results, and I usually meet these winning young Hungarians and their vocational teachers after such competitions. They are all very clever young professionals with very knowledgeable and committed teachers. So I can give you some good examples too. We have tried to switch to, to tune ourselves to, the vocational training system that has made Germany and Austria so successful. It will take years until the transition is complete, but the process has begun, we have developed and adopted the required legislation and – this is important – we have concluded an agreement with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry according to which they will be determining increasingly more elements of the various training courses, because linking to reality is one of the most important criteria within a professional training system, meaning that we need to train our young people for what the market, enterprises and real life actually needs. This system is already operational; it is of course not perfect yet, but we are certainly much closer to providing for the actual requirements of real life than we were four years ago. The other pillar of public education is secondary schools, and this is a harder nut to crack. Because international surveys are regularly being published with regard to changes in education processes over the past eight to ten years,  some of which have international code names such as PISA. These surveys currently show that there is also some kind of problem with the content of teaching. Within the field of education we also had to struggle with the problem that many schools were also teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and local authorities didn't have the funds to maintain them properly. There were significant differences between the level of education in well-funded Budapest schools and poorly funded village schools in rural areas. A child's place of birth practically determined his/her fate. We had to struggle with all of these problems and are still doing so. But what is clear is that we have established the frameworks that are required for the running of a quality education system, but with regard to the content of teaching courses we must carefully analyse the results of international surveys and what changes to teaching work are required if we want to stop deteriorating results. The important thing is that the education system is today in a state that can managed, which gives us a chance of putting a stop to decline and weakening and stepping onto the path of improvement and gain.

GIK: The question here too is whether the teacher is good or bad?

VO: Yes, but the state is training teachers. I wouldn’t like to take the responsibility for education off the shoulders of the state, because the essence of the reorganisation of the education system is that the state is taking responsibility for the quality, content and regulation of education. And so we shouldn't remove any responsibility from the shoulders of the Government when it comes to teacher training either.

GIK: Meanwhile, we also think of the things that will almost certainly go down in the history books with regard to these past four years. And we see events and disasters during which community interests overwrote everyday political battles and in which we truly behaved as a community. People who were perhaps adversaries; red sludge; floods. We saw that you, as Prime Minister, were always there on the front lines in these states of emergency and in the fight against such disasters.

VO: That was partly a questing of honour. I prefer the order 'follow me!' to the order 'charge!'. So I prefer if a leader does what he can personally and shows an example, keeps people's spirits up. The greater the trouble, the greater need there is for such personal involvement. The problem was particularly big with relation to the Danube flood and that especially needed such involvement. But this is about something much deeper than preventing a disaster. The question is, what do we regard as the point and purpose of politics? I am one of those people who believe, and I think Hungarian history reinforces this idea, that our job is to build a community and reinforce the community. We are a country of this size with as many inhabitants as we have, with large ethnic groups of Germanic origin on one side and ethnic groups of Slavic origin on the other. We are on good terms with all of them, but neither are our relatives. If we didn't exist, none of them would mind particularly; our own success is important to us, almost exclusively. This is why it is very important that if we want to be successful, and in fact if we want to remain in existence and survive at all, then the community that we call the Hungarians must exist and become stronger. And so in my view the primary responsibility of all Hungarian leaders, or we could say the responsibility of the nation, is to reinforce the unity of this community.  This is what I have been working for during these past years. The reduction in public utility prices reinforces this solidarity, and so does the goal of full employment; better education and the goal of facilitating the advancement of our children also serves to reinforce the community, but it is in times of emergency that the strength and existence of the community and the results of community-building work truly come to the fore. This is why these moments have become etched into our memories as being so special.

GIK: Let us now have a look at the fact that this community has, in inverted commas, assets, and during the past four years you and the Government have been the trustee of these assets. Let's have a look at some important indices that show us how you have managed these assets. We have here the figures for economic growth, and the data for the past six months is impressive. A new biannual report has just been published, but overall, the average for the past four years isn't too good.

VO: It depends. What do you mean exactly?

GIK: I mean that there was a significant dip between the end of 2011 and the end of 2012.

VO: That's right. What I usually pull out of my bag with reference to this is that we should take a look at how the community that we are a part of, the European Union, is performing. Because when assessing the performance of a country it is important to choose the right standard of comparison, and what I see today is that with regard to every important economic index – unemployment, employment, economic growth, inflation, the foreign trade balance – Hungary is performing better than the European Union average. And in several instances it is performing much better, greatly above the EU average. These represent our opportunities. And my belief is that Hungary and the people of Hungary have made good use of the room for movement we have had available over the course of the past four years.

GIK: Let's take a look at the style and content of these past four years, at the fact that the two-thirds majority represents a mandate and how you have fared with parliamentary work during this time. You have dictated a rapid tempo, adopted a record number of new laws and there have been a record number of decisions made in Parliament. Your critics have often said that this rapidity has had several victims. The opinions of the opposition, for instance…

VO: Of course, the opposition was undoubtedly in trouble over the past four years because the electorate didn't vote for them. It is difficult to pretend to be strong in a situation like that; we, on the other hand, received a two-thirds majority and we felt that we had to fulfil our resulting responsibilities. The opinion of the opposition in a distribution of power of this kind is undoubtedly to be respected, but it is not decisive. My opinion is that of course everything can be done better. I have never seen a job that couldn't have been performed a little better. This is what I was always taught at home: Son, aspire every day to perform better than have until now. This means that it is possible to perform better that you have performed on that particular day, but let us meanwhile retain our sense of reality. The house is on fire, the country is on the edge of bankruptcy in 2010, and we stand up, get ourselves and the people moving, get to it, roll up our sleeves and begin bringing water by the bucketload. Yes, we get into a sweat, maybe our clothes get muddy here and there, the soot gets blown on us too, we don't look as good as if we had gone to a dinner party in suit and black tie, but we have to put this fire out, and we had to save Hungary from financial collapse. We got the job done. We could undoubtedly be a little more elegant. Perhaps now, after these next elections, we will be able to buy some new clothes.

GIK: Let's take a look at the package for the future. Let's have a look at what can be characterised as Viktor Orbán and Fidesz's, or the Viktor Orbán-led Government's offer to the people of Hungary with regard to the future. There are two things that I always find important with relation to this. Firstly, and I'll try and be very practical about this, you say that either the price of energy provided to industry must be reduced somehow to put Hungary and the region into a truly competitive position, or you will try to modify the tax system again. And both of these are important. Because every citizen of Hungary is the end user of some form of energy, gas, etc. So these are important issues. As is the fact, obviously, that everyone would like to see their income tax in single digits.

VO: Full employment and the reduction of public utility prices have been important and will remain important in the future, but these are just instruments. Because the real issue is: what leads to a happier life in Hungary? And all I can add to this as a Member of Parliament, whether in government or in opposition, is that I try and understand why life in Hungary can't be like people would like it to be. And as far as I can see, the biggest problem in Hungary is that there are still lots of people in Hungary who, although they now have an income, they have a job and their monthly bills are in order, have no reserves. And when someone, especially when they are raising children, sees that they have no reserves that they can draw on in times of trouble, if the children become sick, if they happen to lose their jobs or some other problem arises, or simply as their children are growing up, if they have no reserves then they will be full of uncertainty. Even if they have a job. This is why we see, or I feel, that Hungary is living as if it has a permanent blood pressure of 180. And so to be able to live with less stress and greater confidence in Hungary, and to be able to live in greater understanding and peace as a result, our situation must improve economically, which in turn means that the situation of families must improve. This is why families must be protected and supported, and this is why we need public work programmes. This is why we need full employment. This is why we need to reduce taxes and reduce public utility charges, and if we do this, if we see this through, then we will reach a stage at which everyone has enough reserves, enough reserves accumulated from income earned through working, that they can finally feel that they don't have to worry even if life brings with it difficult and troublesome turns, and then the heartbeat and blood pressure of this country will change.

GIK: Ladies and Gentlemen, during the past 20 minutes, just as you have done usually every two weeks over the course of the past three years during some 50 live interviews, with the exception of two occasions, the guest of Kossuth Radio's morning news magazine has been Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Thank you for accepting our invitation!

VO: Thank you for having had the opportunity to be here over the past four years.

(Prime Minister’s Office)