Orbán: War is Causing Hungary’s Inflation, and Only Peace Can End It

The main program of Wednesday’s NATO summit had just barely ended when Viktor Orbán’s Facebook team reported on the happenings of the day, repeating the latest government messages in a precisely-edited video posted to social media.

If we have peace, there will be no war inflation, and we are on the side of peace.

-reiterated the Prime Minister at least three times in the recording, making it clear that the developments currently making life hard in Hungary should be seen exclusively as a direct consequence of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Throughout the video, Orbán said that the food crisis, war inflation, and looming economic crisis was due to the worsening war in Ukraine, and this could only end through peace, which Hungarians support.

As a defensive alliance, NATO should stay out of the conflict, he said, giving the impression that the opposite had come up as a possibility among the other member states.

He mentioned repeatedly that Hungary was pushing for peace, which in turn requires strength. As a result, the planned increase in military spending will be moved up one year, and raised to 2% of the nation’s GDP in 2023.

At the end, Orbán repeated once again that if there is peace, there will be an economic recovery, if there is peace, we won’t have inflation, “and the risks that now threaten Hungary’s security will come to an end.”

The Prime Minister repeated the same message a day earlier in Parliament in another video posted to Facebook.

In truth, Hungary’s inflation rate began increasing months before the start of the war, and analysts point to the enormous handouts given to voters during the election campaign and the development of the forint exchange rate as factors contributing to its rise. [444]