Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wants the next federal government to reduce Germany's influence on the EU.
"I hope that the German government that is now being formed wants a European Germany and not a German Europe in which they (the Germans) tell the others what to do," Orbán said on Sunday at a party conference of his right-wing national party Fidesz in Budapest.
As expected, the delegates re-elected him chairman.
Orbán has ruled Hungary at the top of Fidesz since 2010 almost without a break with a parliamentary two-thirds majority. Parliamentary elections are due next spring. Until March of this year, Fidesz was a member of the European People's Party (EPP), which also includes the CDU and CSU. At the party congress, Orbán affirmed that he supports a “reorganization of the right” in Europe, which the Pole Jaroslaw Kaczynski is demanding of the national conservative party Law and Justice (PiS) ruling in Warsaw.
Fidesz's exit from the EPP came after the differences between Orbán and the German Union parties on the subject of democracy and the rule of law had come to a head.
The EU had already initiated several proceedings against Hungary for violations of the rule of law.
Critics accuse the German Union parties of having blocked an exclusion from Fidesz called for by other EPP members for years.