Anders Vistisen: Budapest has become the center of the European right-wing movement
We cannot give up the struggle!
„Dear President Trump! Listen very carefully. Greenland has been part of the Danish Kingdom for 800 years. It’s an integrated part of our country. It is not for sale. Let me put it in words you might understand. Mr. Trump, f.ck off.” That's the message Strasbourg MEP Anders Vistisen sent to the newly inaugurated US president after he set his sights on Greenland. The speech made the name of the tough Danish politician known around the world, who was interviewed by the Democrat.interview by David Bencsik
You have protested against Donald Trump’s plans for Greenland in a style that has attracted worldwide attention. Is the situation that bad?
It is unacceptable for an ally to try to make territorial gains at the expense of a friendly country. The Americans already have sovereignty in the form of a military base in Greenland, they can have all their security concerns met, but it is an unfriendly act to be so aggressive about it. If they want another base, they can just ask, that shouldn’t be a problem, but this has not been expressed by the US military to have more than one base in Greenland. We even have bases that they could take over or be part of. On the other hand there’s a lot of blame to put on the Danish and Greenlandic government because we haven’t been serious about defending Greenland from the Danish side and the Greenlandic politicians are talking about independence, which is completely unrealistic.
Why?
It’s one of the largest islands in the world and only 55,000 people live there. They are not independent of anything, they can’t defend their sovereignty, they have no army, no police, they have nothing in reality that is not provided by Denmark. This idea, to say that Greenland could be independent, is unreal. If Greenland wasn’t part of the Danish kingdom, it would be taken over by either the USA, China or Russia. No one wants to see such a large strategic area exposed. That’s why it is so hopeless that Greenlandic politicians talk about independence. In reality, the Greenlandic people will never be able to get the same deal as they have with Denmark. 40% of their GNP is provided by Denmark, they don’t have any critical infrastructure that they can pay for themselves, so the Danish kingdom gives them a very generous deal. If we compare what the U.S. offers to the Virgin Islands or American Samoa, even Porto Rico, who can’t vote in presidential elections, who have no elected members in Congress and no voting rights in Congress, it’s the opposite with Greenland, they have over-representation in the Danish parliament and a very fair economic deal. We should rather seek a good deal with the US and discuss security concerns. The idea of mining in Greenland has been around for many years, but so far we haven’t seen a realistic economic scenario of how to mine the minerals in Greenland. If the Americans want to invest in it, they are more than welcome to do so. So far it has never been an economic consideration, neither for the Greenlandic people nor for any international investment company. I think this is an idealistic approach by Donald Trump and not based on a realistic assessment of what can be done in Greenland.
How do the Danes see the situation?
Danish society is very difficult because of the woke issue. Danish politicians are so afraid of offending the Greenlandic people that they are not honest with them. Some Greenlandic politicians claim that we are evil colonial masters who have exploited Greenland, but the truth is quite different. The Norse Vikings were there before the Inuit population, so the original population of Greenland is not Inuit but Viking. Greenland being part of Denmark has never been an economic success, it’s always been Denmark sending money to Greenland to help them. If Denmark would withdraw from there, the living conditions would probably be much worse than in many African countries. Greenland also has many social problems, one in three girls is incest or raped before the age of 18, the level of alcoholism in the population is about 10%, 20% of the educated Greenlanders prefer to stay in Denmark and return after their university education. This society is in no way ready for self-determination. It seems to me that the Americans know very little about Greenland. Yes, they are allies and a historical friend, but on the other hand Trump’s expectations of Greenland are far from realistic. Our problem is that there’s so much misunderstanding. The Greenlanders think they can become independent, which is unrealistic. Danish politicians don’t dare tell them the truth, and Americans think that Greenlanders want to be American. If you are used to free education, free health care and even 40% of your GNP paid by a foreign country, then you should see what the USA offers to partners similar to you. Even Danish conscription does not apply to Greenland, so the people who defend Greenland are conscripted soldiers from Denmark.
You told the Hungarian media in December 2024 that Budapest has become the center of a dialogue about an alternative European future. Can you elaborate on that?
It has to do with the fact that Viktor Orban is the most experienced prime minister of the Patriot Movement and of all the center-right conservative movements in Europe, so he is a natural center of attention. But especially the work of CPAC Hungary and the think tank behind it has created a stage here in Hungary where every year important right-wing politicians from Europe and abroad meet and exchange views and that makes Budapest in my view the center of attention in the right-wing movement in Europe these days and I don’t think we could have created the Patriots without the participation of Fidesz which was sort of the foundation to develop the ID group and the parties from the ID group into the third largest force under the Patriot banner in Europe.
As we speak, Donald Trump is being inaugurated as president. Has Trump defeated the Deep State? You are a member of an important EU committee responsible for EU-USA relations. How do you see the new EU-US relationship starting today?
It will be very challenging because so many leaders in Europe ignored the possibility of Trump winning the presidential election. I think Viktor Orban is the only one who had the vision early on, after Trump lost the presidency for the first time, but even before that he actually continued the dialogue and contact with the Trump camp. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni came in a little later, but they are the only two leaders who seem to have a direct line to Trump. Mark Rutte is the secretary general of NATO, he’s supposed to have a good relationship, we see Emmanuel Macron cultivating the relationship that he had before, but none of them really understand the MAGA movement and so it’s difficult. I expect them to have a truthful dialogue with the Trump administration and I think it’s a big problem for Europe that we have so few leaders who have a good relationship with Trump, and especially the EU is completely ridiculous. I remember the first Trump administration when I was a member of the European Parliament and the EU embassy in Washington called us because they had no direct contacts with the Republican party because they just neglected them and that is very bad work for the EU foreign service, the External Action Service.
Viktor Orban said about Trump’s second term that the recapture of Brussels begins today. What is the role of Viktor Orban in the camp of patriots and Euroskeptics from your point of view?
You have to start by winning the elections, but we all know that even if you win the elections, it’s not over. Look at Trump’s first administration, he didn’t manage to really succeed with the administration because there were a lot of representatives of the deep state who kept obstructing a lot of the policy desires of Trump and the people who voted for him. I think this is also true in Brussels, where the losers of the election continue to rule, not the winners of the election. The deep state is probably even deeper in Brussels than in Washington DC and I think that Viktor Orban can play a role there. I see him as one of the main strategists behind the Patriot Movement. When he visited our group meeting during the Hungarian EU presidency and presented his visions on how the Patriots should develop our cooperation from here and how we should build on what we have already created. He showed that he is one of the best strategists of the European right. We need his vision when it comes to winning some of these institutional negotiations that we have. One thing that he mentioned is fighting this rule of law narrative that has haunted Hungary for so long, but now we see elections being canceled in Romania and nobody cares because the wrong guy won the first round anyway. We see a terrible rule of law in a lot of European countries, but the European Commission seems to only attack when it’s a government that it doesn’t like politically, and that’s where we need to arm ourselves better and fight back. That was one of the things where I agreed with Viktor Orban, because we have to do better as the European right, using the same tactics and giving back the same kind of attacks that we receive every day.
Welcoming migrants regardless of their illegal entry has characterized the West, will this change now?
They rushed through the so-called migration pact just before the elections and then tried to tell everyone, problem solved, everything is done. We knew that the pact was completely useless, at worst it was harmful and allowed more migrants to enter and it was inconsequential. After the elections, the rhetoric has changed, but I don’t believe them on migration. They had so many years to get it right. Luckily in Denmark, as the only Western European country, we started to fight illegal migration at the beginning of the millennium, so we have a slightly better position than our neighboring countries, but still we have such colossal problems with lack of assimilation, and I think we have to be very honest when we talk about illegal migration. The problem is Islamic migration from North Africa and the Middle East. You can see it in all the statistics in Denmark, whether it’s crime statistics, whether it’s welfare statistics, whether it’s unemployment statistics. Many migrants are doing well, especially those with a European, Asian or Latin American background. The only problem we have is migration from muslim countries in northern Africa and the Middle East and to a certain extent from the Balkans. So we have to be very specific here and say that the problem is the influence of Islam. They seem to be Islamizing Western European countries, which is a very serious threat to our cultures and our way of life, not only economically or through crime, but also culturally. We see that these migrants, even in the second, third or fourth generation, are even more radicalized and less able to integrate into Danish society than the first generation. We see that this is the only group of migrants where they become less and less Western, Christian, Danish as the years go by, which I think is basically true in all countries where we have seen this migration. There is no one who has managed to integrate or assimilate this kind of migrants into their societies, and I think that just shows that these migrants are the problem, not Western societies.
We hear horror stories from Sweden, and in Norway, the right-wing Progress Party forced the Norwegian Statistics Bureau to publish ethnic-based crime data. Africa and the Middle East top the list.
Sweden is an extreme example because they had the most extreme migration policy regarding illegal migration, so yes, the trend is the same, but Sweden is now the murder capital of the world, not even of the Western world, but of the whole world. They have a lot of gang related murders and shootings and so much sexual violence against Swedish women that it is incomparable to anything you see in Europe but the trends are exactly the same. Migrants from these regions are 2-3-4 times more criminal than the average population.
The European Green Deal seems to have been a disaster. Germany has become a net importer of nuclear energy. Will common sense replace ideology-based energy policy in Brussels?
I think so, the election result was a big no to illegal migration and a no to Green Deal policies that kill jobs in Europe, but we have seen the Commission President doing the exact opposite and the social democratic parties in Europe are the weakest point in history, at least in modern history. But who exactly gets the green portfolios? We see a radicalized socialist from Spain, Teresa Ribera, as vice president in charge of transition, we see the social democratic Danish commissioner Dan Jørgensen in charge of energy and housing, so why, when you have so many EPP appointees, even patriots, why are you giving away these very important industry portfolios to the socialists? This has only to do with the stupidity of Commission President von der Leyen and her own intention to be part of this Green Deal and I think it makes perfect sense in her world because she was the responsible minister in the German government that abolished nuclear energy. If anyone should be criticized for making Europe more dependent on foreign countries, whether it’s Russia or the oil producing countries of the Middle East, it’s Angela Merkel and her government with von der Leyen, they should be held responsible for this terrible dependence we have on foreign energy sources. And no matter what we think, Europe should be independent in energy policy, but this stupidity has manifested itself everywhere. Even in Denmark, where we produce gas, we suddenly stopped producing gas. That doesn’t make sense because we don’t need it ourselves, we export it, but it’s much better for European energy production to have Danish and Norwegian gas in the taps in Germany than to import it from the US or Russia.
The woke world is crumbling before our eyes. What will change in the EU now that our woke champions don’t have massive transatlantic support?
I think the voters rejected it very deeply, but I don’t think we should be too optimistic that it will go away. I see the woke ideology as the heir of the communist ideology, the group thinking of communism. As a Dane, I should not lecture people from the bad side of the Iron Curtain about communism, but about what we experienced in Western Europe, that everyone could see that what they were doing in Eastern Europe was a disaster. Nevertheless, they managed to hold on in the university elites, in the media elites, and we experienced exactly the same. Even though 90% of ordinary Europeans reject all this woke ideology, they are the ones who decide what is shown on television, what is published in universities and so on, even though the people reject it, as they did in communism when they had a free choice, it is still very difficult to get rid of it, because these are the same pockets of very high elites of society who are promoting these ideas, as communism promoted 30-40 years ago. It’s actually, in my opinion, the same group thinking that has just evolved into wokeness, it’s the same people who believe in this utopian model of society who think they have the right to take away our values, to correct us, to humiliate us in our own societies. I think that this is not a battle that we have won, but a battle whose battlefield we are now on, but we cannot dare to abandon. Even today we see children being subjected to transgender treatment, having hormones put into their bodies before they reach the age of puberty, we see ridiculous ideas of male prisoners wanting to serve in female prisons, things that are logically so ridiculous that even a 5 year old child can see that this is crazy, but the elites will defend it. The most famous author of Denmark is Hans Christian Andersen, and he has a fairy tale called The Emperor’s New Clothes, where the emperor, obsessed with fancy clothes, is convinced by two swindlers that they can sew the most beautiful cloth, but if you are an incompetent idiot, you cannot see it. No one in the royal court would admit that they couldn’t see the cloth, and the emperor himself wouldn’t admit that even he couldn’t see the cloth. Finally, the impostor weavers report that the suit is ready. They imitate dressing him, and he goes out in a celebration before the whole city. The townspeople go along uncomfortably, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The point of the story is that the most educated people are sometimes much easier to fool than a common person. In Denmark we have a saying that if you want to know the truth, ask a drunk or a child, because they don’t have that filter on what they say. This applies to some extent to wokeism, that we need common sense to fight it, and if you are educated well enough in a western university, the one thing you will certainly lose is common sense.
American patriots took back their country. What’s your vision for the EU?
I think we have a very interesting election season ahead of us, what we see now in Austria is that they will probably have a patriotic chancellor, Mr. Kickl will most likely take over there, we are also looking forward to the Czech election where it is very likely that ANO will do well and can form a center-right coalition, and then we have the Romanian presidential election which is now very controversial but it could also change the direction of one of the bigger countries in this region. Then the big question is what’s going to happen with the dynamic engines of the EU, France and Germany. Germany is going to have a new election that will most likely make the country ungovernable. We will see a very strong AfD on the right, then a very strong Wagenknecht party on the left, and probably a new edition of the grand coalition of CDU and SPD, which will leave Germany without a political mandate and difficult to govern, and the economic decline will continue. France is the hope. If Macron is forced to call a presidential election, either Bardella or Marine Le Pen would be well positioned to take over. Such big countries changing can change the dynamic. We also have the Polish presidential election coming up, if the Law and Justice Party (PiS) of Jarosław Kaczyński can’t win the presidential election, Poland will become a very difficult country to deal with, with Tusk feeling very confident. For the long-term stability of Poland, PiS should remain the presidential power. That maintains a kind of balance.
Can Hungary become a geopolitical Switzerland, offering a place for clear and honest dialogues between East and West?
The head on the nail is clear and honest. The problem is that some of the EU leaders are now using the Ukraine issue as a power grab against the nation-states. So if we look at the rhetoric around Ukraine, the countries that are most affected are clearly what we call the Scandinavian countries and the Baltic countries and Poland, and that’s about it. France and Germany have similar rhetoric but no action. Obviously they don’t really care about Ukraine, they don’t really care about Russia, what they care about is getting more power for the EU in foreign affairs, in defense and security. So I think Viktor Orban is honest about what Hungary’s foreign policy interests are and he was able to meet with the Chinese and Russian presidents and Donald Trump and the Ukrainian president to talk about these issues and I think that’s helpful because something has to happen during the Trump presidency and I don’t want any escalation of the war. Hopefully there will be a peace agreement. The only realistic scenario is something like Korea or Cyprus with security guarantees and then we can all focus on what we are going to do in the long term. I’m also quite concerned about the EU’s push for Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership. Let’s face it, you can’t have a NATO member that doesn’t have secure borders, you can’t have a situation where Article 5 is triggered.
What about the Copenhagen Criteria?
When it comes to the EU it is even worse, it looks like all the Copenhagen criteria are being thrown out with the bathwater in the case of Ukraine, as we say in Denmark. We all know that the level of corruption in Ukraine is astronomically high, but we also see the problems with the treatment of minorities, which is not dealt with at all, the absolute lack of economic performance. Amazingly, the same people who cannot stop talking negatively about Hungary and Poland are now completely ignoring the facts in Ukraine. If they really think ideologically that Budapest is the most horrible place in Europe, let alone for LGBTQ people, then they need to be honest about the real situation in Kiev in this regard. Our point is very clear: to become a member of the EU, especially if you’re such a big country like Ukraine, you have to meet the criteria first. It’s a big problem politically, but also economically. Denmark has calculated what the price of Ukraine’s accession would be, and the price for Denmark alone would be about 4 billion euros, and at the same time the agricultural support would be cut by 20-25% of what Denmark gets now. I don’t see any willingness from the Danish side to pay such a huge amount for Ukraine’s accession, it lacks reality, but it seems that reality has been abolished and the EU elites are pushing for Ukraine’s accession as soon as possible. I hope there will be at least one or two countries that will block this madness, and of course before we can talk about Ukraine’s accession they have to live up to the same standards as everyone else. We cannot let these countries in before they meet the Copenhagen criteria.