A few hours ago, the European Parliament’s left-liberal, anti-Hungary gang adopted the report submitted by French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield on the current state of our “rule of law.” If you haven’t been following the lifecycle of the latest rule of law report but are familiar with the contents of its earlier versions (the Tavares Report in 2013 and the Sargentini Report in 2018), then you should be fine. The subject and key accusations of the European witch hunt against Hungary haven’t really changed in the last decade. Nothing new here.
What makes this especially poignant today is that at a time when people around Europe are struggling financially and worry about whether they’ll be able to foot soaring energy bills, these so-called representatives of the people, in the comfort of their Brussels offices, somehow find time to launch an ideologically driven attack on Hungary – again.
Two things: Hungary has taken in nearly one million refugees fleeing the war in neighboring Ukraine. That’s nearly ten percent of our population. We are delivering to Ukraine the largest humanitarian aid package in our country’s history. But whatever.
Secondly, Delbos-Corfield comes from a party that took a meager 13.5 percent of the vote in 2019. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling alliance was re-elected for the third time last year, winning nearly 50 percent of the vote and with that its largest parliamentary majority ever, more than two-thirds. But a Green politician from France is going to school us in democracy.
In Hungary, according to the report:
- The government is “deliberately and systematically” undermining fundamental EU values
- Hungary is essentially an “electoral autocracy”
- There is no freedom of speech, assembly or religion
- Free press is non-existent
- Freedom of the judiciary can be brought into question
I could go on. What really matters, however, is that these statements have precisely two things in common: They are groundless and factually incorrect, and they have all been around for at least a decade in the European Parliament’s slanted reports, despite all our efforts to talk some sense into the Brussels-based EU elite that they have been barking up the wrong tree all the while.
Because what the report doesn’t tell you are the true reasons behind the EP’s latest crusade against Hungary. They’ve come out swinging because of that record-breaking election result, the third, consecutive two-thirds parliamentary majority.
PM Orbán’s government has been working hard to live up to the mandate given to us by the majority of Hungary’s electorate: We have been consistently fighting off the illegal migration pressure on our southern borders, kept LGBTQ activists out of our schools and protected our children, and right now, we are the most vocal opponents of Brussels’ failed sanctions policy on Russia.
And the European Parliament’s majority, most of whom hail from left-liberal parties in post-Christian Western Europe, find this difficult to stomach. So, they came up with the clever idea of pushing through a “rule of law report” every four or five years in a desperate attempt to make political hay and shape the political discourse about Hungary on the European stage. In this case, the word “desperate” might even be an understatement.
After all, one thing remains certain: If the Hungarian government has to choose between standing up for the interests of Hungarian families and satisfying the political palate of our opponents in the European Parliament, then we will always put Hungary first. Period.
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