In connection with the European Commission’s recently released Rule of Law report, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said “the picture has become clear as one followed the sequence of events”.
PM Orbán told Kossuth Rádió that the EC first released a migration plan which the Visegrad Group rejected. A next step was the Commission’s Vice-President Vera Jourová “attacking Hungary” and “branding Hungarians as idiots” which Orbán said was “unacceptable”.
“A top EU official cannot be allowed to speak in disrespectful terms about the citizens of any member state, including Hungarians,” PM Orbán said, adding that had the EC Vice-President spoken in such a tone about the Germans or French, she “would have been fired in an instant”.
“We want equal treatment, as we will not tolerate being offended the same way Germans of French would refuse to be,” the prime minister said. PM Orbán said the third step after Jourová’s “attack” was the EC’s releasing its Rule of Law report. Orbán called the document a “Soros report”, adding that 12 of the 13 source organisations referenced in it had received financial support from the US financier. He said the EC report was “an open, coordinated attack”.
PM Orbán said he suggested to the European Commission to “consider carefully” its strengths and the challenges posed by the global coronavirus pandemic. He said protection measures should be in focus, but instead, “member states are being attacked, the issue of migration is being raised again and incomprehensible rule of law disputes are being generated”. As regards the letter he had sent to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, in which he called for the resignation of Vera Jourová, Orbán said he had yet to receive an answer. PM Orbán insisted that European politicians were “tense” because the EU’s share of world economy has shrunk from 24%-25% twenty years ago to some 15 percent today.
Regarding the EU’s economic recovery package designed to mitigate the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, PM Orbán said Hungary “is not happy about the idea of a loan taken out jointly by the member states, to be paid back over the course of 30 years,” but was ready to go along with it to aid the countries urgently needing financial help. Meanwhile, Brussels should focus on pandemic defence rather than making funding conditional on “complicated legal requirements”, as that could “financially rattle certain countries,” PM Orbán said.