Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said the liberal elite in Brussels must be replaced with a new patriotic European leadership which will strengthen a Europe of nations rather than building its own power.

During a ceremony of the Hunyadi Janos Award of the Foundation for a Civic Hungary, in which this year's award was given to Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, PM Orbán told the event: "It is our shared task to restore a Europe of nations."

PM Orbán said that the "rights unlawfully confiscated from nations" should be returned. Regulations must be enforced equally on all member states, he said. "The agents of the Soros network must be excluded from the European Commission, and corrupt lobbyists must be removed from the European Parliament. The European Union cannot be a financial network aiming to weaken national governments," he said.

"The cleaning that our friends in America are doing now will be needed here in Brussels as well," he added.

"The era of the progressive liberalism that reigns in Brussels is over; there's a patriotic realignment taking place on the other side of the Atlantic," PM Orbán said. "Patriots are the strongest political force in both central and southern Europe."

"The progressives have taken over Brussels," the prime minister said. "They rule Brussels. Unless we change this, we’ll soon have to watch Europe fall apart."

In his speech, PM Orbán said last autumn Salvini had been facing a prison sentence even though he had been "protecting his country and Europe". Salvini, he said, had been "persecuted by the globalists because he dared to confront them". But it had turned out, PM Orbán added, "that the charges were all false and it was a political witch-hunt".

"Salvini deserves an award, not punishment, for what he does," the prime minister added.

PM Orbán warned that Europe was being "flooded by unprecedented masses of people", arguing that 9 million illegal migrants had made their way to the continent since 2015. "Strikingly, this is the number we learned from the Soros plan in 2015," Orban said. "One million migrants a year, so not only does the plan exist, but it’s also working." He said that if migrants formed a single country, they would now be the European Union’s 15 largest.

PM Orbán said that while Hungary had stopped illegal migration on land, Salvini had stopped it on sea.

"We both protected our nations and this has resulted in there now being patriots in government in both Italy and Hungary," PM Orbán said.

He said Salvini was not just protecting his country, "but an entire civilisation", adding that "the battle is being fought for the soul of the Western world", which was "worth even the hardest struggle".

In his acceptance speech, Salvini said the biggest threats to Europe were "Islamic extremism" and uncontrolled immigration.

PM Orbán said it was important to protect the freedom of speech and push back against censorship, adding that the new US administration offered "great hope" to Europe when it came to freedom. He urged patriots to pour all of their energy into achieving victory for the causes important to them.