The Hungarian government summoned the US ambassador on Tuesday over President Joe Biden's recent remarks on Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
At a news conference on a different diplomatic event, Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was asked about Biden attributing to PM Orbán words that suggested that the Hungarian prime minister didn’t think democracy worked. “We are not obliged to take lies from anyone, even if that person is the President of the United States,” Minister Szijjártó said. “Since such a lie has been said in connection with the Hungarian prime minister, we summoned the ambassador of the United States to the ministry, who was here today,” he said. “We asked the ambassador to present to us the quote, and the time and place the prime minister allegedly made such a statement.” “As such a statement was obviously not made, we could not get any meaningful answer,” Minister Szijjártó said. He said that a reference made by the US ambassador to the official US position that Hungary was “building a dictatorship” made it extremely difficult to further build Hungarian-US relations, arguing that such a suggestion “is an offence not to the government, but to the country”.