Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2017 (29. évfolyam, 1-50. szám)

2017-02-24 / 8. szám

Hungary’s foreign minister: We are not Europe’s bad boys, we are the honest boys

While US President Donald Trump conducted his combative press conference at the White House last week, one of his truest friends in Europe was in New Zealand defending him. Hungary’s young Foreign Minister, Peter Szijjarto, aged 38, was in Wellington to open a new embassy in a high-rise on Lambton Quay. But diplomatic discourse everywhere is focused on Trump.

“The international media has been so unfair to him,” he said. “If Hillary Clinton said the same things as Donald Trump is saying now, she would be celebrated by the liberal international media.” Hungary could be described as Trump’s soul mate in Europe.

Often seen as the “bad boys of Europe,” the populist right-wing Government of Viktor Orbán has attracted a lot of criticism from within Hungary, Europe and from the former Obama Administration. It built a wire fence on its southern border with armed guards after thousands of refugees poured through the country in 2015 en route to Western Europe.

It is building container camps to hold asylum seekers on its borders while their status is determined. It has refused to accept the EU’s proposal to resettle refugees by quota. It does not even accept the term “refugees.”

Szijjarto says the 1.5 million who arrived it was a “mass illegal migration.” And he rejects the label “bad boys of Europe.”

“We are the honest boys of Europe, the honest boys of the European Union because we hate political correctness and we hate hypocrisy,” he told the Herald. “We think these are the two issues, political correctness and hypocrisy which caused so much trouble to the European Union.”

The EU faced historic challenges - migration, the threat of terror, Brexit, energy security, war in Ukraine “and the reason we have not found proper answers so far is that we were not able to name the challenges properly.”

He said the vote by Britain to leave the EU was a consequence of the mismanagement of the European Commission. The sanctions against Russia over Crimea had failed politically and economically.

“But if you speak like this in the European Union, you are always going to be bashed and abused and described as ‘bad boys’ in the media. We will not give up on that. We will always be honest. “

A raft of new laws, including moves to weaken the role of Hungary’s Constitutional Court attracted the criticism of the European Commission and the Obama Administration.

And Szijjarto was snubbed in Washington. He was refused a meeting with his counterpart at the time, Secretary of State John Kerry. Instead he was handed what is known in diplomatic terms as a “non-paper” by an assistant Secretary of State with a list of the measures Hungary had to take before its relationship with the US could be upgraded.

“We in Hungary have suffered in the last six years from attempts to interfere in our internal politics by the Democrat Administration. If you look around the world, this American foreign policy which wanted everyone to believe that one-size fits all actually created many unstable situations all over the world. Now with Donald Trump taking away the ‘export of democracy’ from the focus of their foreign policy things will be better for the whole world,” Szijjarto said.

Commenting on Brexit in a speech later, Szijjarto said the worst thing the EU could do would be to punish the UK.

“Our position is that the stupidest, dumbest way to deal with this issue on behalf of Europe would be to penalise them. Unfortunately some European bureaucrats in Brussels feel themselves personally insulted by the decision of the British and they want to penalise them, which is the worst possible scenario. It is in the interests of the European Union to stay in the tightest possible co-operation, economically speaking, tradewise speaking, investment-wise speaking with the UK.”

Despite Hungary’s trenchant criticism of the EU, Szijjarto said Hungary remained a committed member of the EU and it had no intention of leaving.

Szijjarto was questioned at the NZIIA meeting by Estonia’s honorary Consul, Tony Loorparg, who arrived in New Zealand as a boy in 1949 by ship and with many Hungarian refugees. He said the minister’s description of refugees did not equate with his own experience as a refugees.

“My concern is that some of the lessons that Europe tried to correct after the Second World War are starting to be forgotten by some Governments of Europe,” Loorparg said to resounding applause.

Szijjarto responded by saying it was wrong to equate Hungary’s refugees with the behaviour of those who had marched through Hungary in 2015.

“None of them attacked Austrian police. None of them behaved in an inappropriate manner. They respected the rules and regulations of the given country. They were thankful to be taken by someone. And when the decision was made that they could leave, they left. They waited patiently in refugee camps until they could go somewhere “for which we are always grateftil, for example, to New Zealand. But the behaviour of the 1.5 million in 2015 who marched through countries in an aggressive way was quite different,’’Szijjarto said. “Please, please, do not [draw] a parallel between them because it is not the same.” nzherald.co.nz

Award-Winning Hungarian Director “Ashamed” At Current Direction Of Hungarian Politics

Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s film On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (the Berlinale), the festival’s highest honor.

In an interview with the German Deutcshlandradio following her fdm’s win, the director expressed her distaste with the current state of Hungarian politics, as well as with the current government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Enyedi was asked about a scene in On Body and Soul in which a police officer is bribed to ignore a crime, and whether or not this scene is meant to reflect the current state of Hungarian society. Enyedi responded, saying that “This is our everyday life. Ok, give me a little meat, a little from this, a little from that—that was socialism.. .But what is happening in our homeland today is shameful, and truly fills me with fear.”

The director went on to argue that what American citizens are now experiencing with the electoral victory of businessman and former reality-TV host Donald Trump is something that Hungarians have been living with for years:

“To those living in the United States in the aftermath of their election, I would like to say: look, we here [in Hungary] went throughout this same thing years ago. Unfortunately, however, I no good advice to give, because we can’t seem to solve this problem either. From a certain view this is scary because not only do they [the Hungarian government] work around the laws in a dishonest way, they are changing and destroying the basis of laws and are destroying the foundations of democracy and democratic control. I would love to be proud of my country, but I have not been able to for many years, and that is painful to me.”

Hungarian Member of the European Parliament Tamás Deutsch, one of the founding members of Mr. Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, responded to Enyedi’s statement on Facebook, commenting

“Dear Ildikó, what is currently happening in our homeland is that, for the first time in twelve years you were finally able to make a film. Don’t be ashamed, and don’t be afraid of it.”

Deutsch’s comment was a reference to the fact that On Body and Soul received financial support from the Hungarian National Film Fund, which was established by the Orbán government in 2010 to help support Hungarian filmmakers. Hungarian films made under the new subsidization regime have won more than 100 prestigious international awards, including Son of Saul by the director László Nemes Jeles, which won the Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category, hungarytoday.hu

Hungary pays couples who pledge to have babies

While Hungary’s premier Viktor Orbán strongly opposes immigration, an outflow west is wreaking demographic havoc on the country. His answer is CSOK, a housing grant and loan scheme for couples who promise to have babies.

Newlyweds Gabor and Zsuzsi have big plans. It doesn’t take a detective - like Gabor - to see that Zsuzsi .will become a mother any day now. “We are expecting a little girl,” Gabor announced from the living room sofa in their rented flat, adding that he will carry on with his police work, while Zsuzsi raises the child at home.

“We immediately applied after we heard about the scheme on the radio last January, and were specifically interested in the TO + 10 deal,’” Gabor added, referring to the “ftill CSOK” 10 million forints (32,250 euro) grant and 10 million forint low-interest loan deal that the Hungarian government is offering to married couples aged under 40 who commit to raising three children or more.

Within months of hearing about the deal, a new Hungarian was on the way. However, after a bureaucratic struggle involving “10 application forms,” Gabor and Zsuzsi gave up. “The stipulation that we had to provide the 20 million forints up front and be reimbursed later was just not realistic,” explained the police officer, who requested DW not use his real name.

Last year the Hungarian state paid out 81.5 billion forints to some 34,500 families through the CSOK scheme.

However, some have begun questioning whether CSOK is addressing Hungary’s demographic crisis or simply boosting its GDP figures. The outflow of young and educated Hungarians since Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010, coupled with 26 years of declining birthrates, has started to cause problems. Around half of the firms in Hungary struggle to fill vacancies, according to a report by ManpowerGroup, placing the country’s skills shortage among the most acute in the EU, after Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Moreover, Hungary has Europe’s worst intergenerational social mobility rate, a recent study found. Demographics experts fear CSOK may further cement these social divides.

Government spokesman Zoltán Kovács shrugged off Hungary’s wide economic disparity gap as just “one element,” and pointed to the larger context of new social and family policies: “CSOK is going to boost the Hungarian building industry, and it helps Hungarians reach their desire for their own home,” he told DW.

That latter point is disputed by Dorottya Szikra, a sociology professor and researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA): “CSOK is absolutely for the middle class, people who already own property.” She underlined that CSOK applicants must put up their own money.

Szikra noted that earlier state housing assistance schemes had been eliminated to make way for CSOK, meaning that people struggling to maintain their homes now receive little or no assistance from the state. “Demographic experts say family and population policies need a longer-term, more designed and complex program,” she added.

“With CSOK, Orbán wants to promote those who work and diminish the other parts of the welfare state,” Szikra said. “I see similarities in family policies between the [long-term communist leader Janos] Kadar regime. The difference is that [Kadar] had a more complex population policy program, which also included housing policy. Today’s family policies are less coordinated.”

• According to Balazs Kapitány, deputy director of the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute: “CSOK may help middle class families with three children, but it will not have a significant demographic effect.”

Another “full CSOK” applicant is Zoltán Kalmar, chief sales officer at ingatlan.com, Hungary’s largest property website, and a father of two. “We are building a twin house with another family, at a combined cost of 220 million forints,” he told DW. “But actually CSOK is a bad thing for me, because construction workers’ fees have gone up by 20 percent,” he said, adding that property prices had risen by more than 30 percent in the last year.

Kalmar also pointed to the risks involved in taking advantage of CSOK. “We are planning to have a third child, but if - for whatever reason - we don’t, we’ll have to repay it at a much higher interest rate after 10 years.” He was, however, upbeat about CSOK’s potential demographic impact: “In my opinion a lot of people with two children are thinking ‘Let’s have another one - why not?”’

If anyone fits the profile of the citizen that the Hungarian government wants to keep within the borders, it is surely Mate Losonczi. A trilingual engineering graduate who married his high-school sweetheart, he has two young children and commutes from Szeged to the vast tire factory of multi-national firm Intercontinental in nearby Mako. Losonczi and his wife applied for one of the “mini-CSOK” schemes that offers families smaller sums for a small step up the housing market.

“We nearly gave up at one point, but finally we got it,” he told DW, after explaining his and his wife’s odyssey thorough CSOK’s labyrinthine application process. The 1.6 million forints (5,158 euros) have enabled them to move across Szeged to a larger flat.

“I think CSOK is really good for the middle class: You can buy a house if you don’t already own one,” he said. “I know people in Szeged with their own downtown flat, who thought: ‘Why not buy a plot and build a new house and rent out the old flat?’” he told DW.

“We know what the government wants: more Hungarians, because we are getting older and older and pensions are becoming a big problem, but you can see that it doesn’t really work. In Germany or in the UK people earn much more money, and babies aren’t being born there either,” Losonczi added.

Demographics expert Kapitány echoed this sentiment: “If we knew the answer to the demographic position we would do it. Population policy is very complicated and can have a bigger impact in non-democracies - and Hungary is still a democracy.” dw.com

Február 24,2017