Thank you for giving me the floor at this Speakers´ Reception. This is not for the first time, I appreciate it. I am, however, not sure it is reciprocal. It seems to me that I always disappoint you. I am afraid it will not be different now.

The topic which was suggested to me – what will make Europe better – is interesting and challenging. One can be serious about it and attempts at making a comprehensive academic presentation, or one can take this opportunity as a nonserious amuse-bouche (or an aperitif) before tomorrow’s official Vienna Congress presentations. The form can be more or less entertaining, more or less politically correct, more or less heart-warming or disturbing our great maestro David Ungar-Klein, but the substance will be the same.

To make Europe better asks for getting rid of its current organizational form, of its – human energy, human ingenuity and natural propensity of free people to be active – blocking organizational and institutional edifice we call European Union. This unproductive, costly, bureaucratic, human freedom strangling institution based in Brussels, with its expositures in 28 European countries, doesn´t make it possible to have better Europe.

How to do it, how to achieve this goal, is of secondary importance. What we need first is the will to do it, the conviction that to do it is an inevitable precondition for making Europe better.

Better means more free, more democratic, more prosperous, more in favour of traditional human arrangements, less politically correct, less multiculturalist, less green, less antinationalistic and antipatriotic, less culturally progressivistic, etc. Let´s make it more like Trump than Hillary.

Last year we experienced a Brexit revolution, then a Trump revolution (the Austrian revolution regretfully failed – one cannot win always and everywhere), we hope for similar successes in other European countries in the near future. Something has changed. The silent majority is awakening, La Rebelión de las Masas, Der Aufstand der Massen, is approaching.

Václav Klaus, Opening remarks at the Speakers' Reception, Vienna Com.Sult Congress, Vienna City Hall, Vienna, January 16, 2017.