Zoltán Kovács, the state secretary in charge of international relations and communications, said the government “has a plain duty” to protect Hungary’s reputation and institutions against “unfounded political attacks”.
Kovács said the father of Antifa activist Ilaria Salis “has launched a series of unfounded political attacks against Hungary in the international press and in the European Parliament.” Kovács said that Salis, who is now in detention in Hungary, and her accomplices had come to the country to launch premeditated attacks against people “they thought to be Fascist”. They attacked people in the street “from behind so [the victims] had no chance of protecting themselves, causing them serious injuries,” he said. Salis’s father “has toured the whole Western European and American press; he even got into the European Parliament and expressed serious, unfounded accusations… We cannot ignore them,” Kovács said. Salis’s father, he added, had politicised his daughter’s case, and “now he is surprised that he gets political responses” to his unfounded claims, the state secretary said.