Orban at the European Parliament: photo - EPA/Patrick Seeger
“Our country was a dictatorship. So, for us, freedom and democracy are as important as air,” Orban told Poland's public broadcaster TVP, Thursday.
The EU has threatened to take away Budapest's voting rights within the 27 nation bloc if it does not repeal some of the measures enacted in Hungary's constitution, forced through parliament by Viktor Orban's right wing Fidesz party last April and which came into force on 1 January.
A bailout package agreed with the EU and IMF has also been put on hold.
But Orban has said that he is willing to abandon a planned merger of Hungary's central bank and financial markets regulator PSZAF.
Orban told TVP that he is seeking compromise on other issues related to the new constitution at a meeting with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso next week.
Orban came under sustained attack during a debate in the European Parliament this week, when MEPs accused his Fidesz government of trying to compromise the independence of Hungary's central bank and of the judiciary and the planned forced retirement of 300 judges by reducing the retirement age of senior lawyers from 70 to 62 years old.
Support for the embattled Hungarian PM has come both from Poland's conservative, eurosceptic Law and Justice opposition but also from Prime Ministter Donald Tusk, a centre-right politician who has previously modelled himself as the ideal European.
Tusk said the political reactions in the EU to recent events in Hungary were “exaggerated”, that Hungary has “a European standard of democracy” and that he would seek to help his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban at the forthcoming European summit next week.
Many observers say that PM Tusk's recent eurosceptic shift is part of his campaign to get Poland to be involved in negotiations on the eurozone finance crisis deals even though Poland had yet to adopt the single currency.
Tusk's christian-democrat Civic Platform party is, like Orban's Fidesz, part of the European People's Party (EPP) voting bloc within the European Parliament.
Viktor Orban told Poland's TVP broadcaster yesterday that his government “would not have dared try and change Hungary's constiotution if we did not have the support of two-thirds of the population,” referring to ther fact that Fidesz has over two-thirds of MPs in parliament.
Orban said that if necessary, he would “turn to [Poland] for support" in the fight with Brussels. (pg)