West’s 500-year hegemony is over – Orban 

The West’s 500-year global hegemony is over and the future will belong to Eurasia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has stated. 

 The idea that “the whole world should be organized on a Western model” and that nations will be willing to join it “in exchange for economic and financial benefits” has failed, Orban said at the Eurasia Forum in Budapest on Thursday.    

The Western world has been challenged from the East, the Hungarian leader declared, adding that the “next period will be the century of Eurasia.” 

“Five-hundred years of the civilizational dominance of the West came to an end,” Orban said.    

According to the Hungarian leader, Asian countries have become stronger and proved they are capable of “rising, existing, and lasting as independent centers of economic and political power.” They now have both a demographic and technological advantage over their Western peers, he claimed.   

As a result, the center of the world economy has shifted to the East, where economies are growing four times faster than the Western ones, Orban said. “The added value of Western industry accounts for 40% of the world, and that of Eastern industry for 50%. This is the new reality.”  

While Asia accounts for 70% of the global population and has a share of 70% in the world economy, the EU has emerged as the “number one loser” in the changing reality, according to Orban. He claimed that the West has also “suffocated” in its own environment, facing challenges such as migration, gender ideology, ethnic conflicts, and the Russia-Ukraine crisis.   

“It is understandably difficult for Western leaders to give up the sense of superiority to which they are accustomed, that we are the smartest, the most beautiful, the most developed, and the richest,” Orban argued.   

According to the Hungarian leader, the Western elites have arranged themselves to protect the “status quo of the old glory,” which will eventually lead to an economic and political blockade. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also repeatedly stated that humanity is moving away from hegemony towards multipolarity. Earlier this month, he said that the era of Western elites being able to exploit other nations and other peoples across the world is coming to an end.    

Addressing the Valdai Forum in Sochi, the Russian president said “old hegemons” who had become accustomed to ruling over the world as they did during colonial times see that they are no longer being listened to. Putin also warned that the West’s beliefs about its own exceptionalism could potentially “lead to a global tragedy.”