Zoltán Kovács, the state secretary for international relations and communication, said questions at Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hours-long press conferences are not pre-screened.
Reacting to recent remarks by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, Kovács said on the X platform on Wednesday that De Croo “has distinguished himself for his Hungary-bashing and Orbánophobia so we’re not surprised at this latest smear, but he’s also got a loose relationship with the facts”. Kovács said De Croo had “clearly never seen any of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hours-long press conferences – no, the questions are not pre-screened”. “One might suggest that the honourable PM of Belgium spend less time throwing cheap jabs at his fellow EU prime minister and more time contemplating why he’s struggling to win re-election on June 9 in the national vote,” Kovács said. “There was that unfortunate story about the national budget a while back, but perhaps also it’s time to change that pro-war stance.” De Croo said in response to a question from Belgian daily De Knack on Wednesday that he did not want to cooperate with the Vlaams Belang party under any circumstances, because “we are not going to plunge Flanders into chaos”. He said he believed in democracy, adding that if he were an “Orbán-like prime minister”, his spokesperson would have asked to be given the questions in advance, “and you would have only been allowed to ask me the questions that I liked”. “Fortunately, we don’t live in such a country,” he added.