Orban: Hungarians 'champions of survival'

One hundred years after Hungary's defeat in the first world war and the post-war Trianon Peace Treaty "we Hungarians stand on the stage of European history as the champions of survival", Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at the inauguration of the National Cohesion Memorial on Thursday. "There is no other nation in the world that would have survived a century like this," Orban said at the memorial at Budapest's Kossuth Square before a class of graduate military officers on the national holiday celebrating St. Stephen, Hungary's first Christian king. Hungary's reckoning over the Trianon Treaty on the centenary of its signing this past June has allowed the nation to declare an end to "the era of Hungary's hundred years of solitude", the prime minister said. After the collapse of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, Hungary became the largest economy and most populous state in the Carpathian Basin, he said, adding that "this comes with responsibilities that we can't shy away from".