Viktor Orban’s exchange of pleasantries with Ursula van der Leyen in Strasbourg yesterday
Yesterday morning as I took my cup of coffee over breakfast, I switched on Euronews and came upon a live broadcast from Strasbourg, where Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban was addressing the European Parliament in his capacity as President of the European Council under its six-month rotation principle which runs until 31 December.
The European Council, let us remember, is one of the Executive European Institutions consisting of the heads of government of the member states of the EU. It thus consists of directly elected leaders whereas the President of the European Commission, the other Executive Institution, is chosen by the European Parliament, in principle, from the party with greatest number of MEPs. The rest of the Commission, essentially, the cabinet of ministers of Europe, is named by the President of the Commission as he or she sees fit, with an eye to allocating some ministerial responsibility to every member state; the candidate commissioners are approved or rejected by the European Parliament in open session. This is a procedure which is now about to begin as a new ‘cabinet’ forms based upon the results of the June 2024 Europe wide parliamentary elections.
Now that I have stated who is who and what is what in the European Institutions, I take you back to yesterday morning’s Euronews broadcast on their English language channel. The remarkable thing was that there was no simultaneous translation either in voice-over or in text stream at the bottom of the screen as is the customary practice of this channel. I then switched to the French channel of Euronews and found the same thing: no translation from Hungarian.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, a perfect example of censorship in action. The Commission did not want what Orban was saying to be heard by the 450 million citizens of the Union, and we did not hear it on Euronews, the captive broadcaster.
But free speech and free dissemination of information have not entirely dried up in Europe (yet) and Orban’s appearance before the European Parliament delivering his report on the objectives of the Hungarian presidency was available later on the internet in translation. I duly watched this and found it to be a slightly boring recitation of why Mario Draghi’s recent report on Europe’s economic weaknesses is a wake-up call to put in place an industrial policy and make other fundamental economic reforms. He also discussed the challenges Europe faces on migration policy, on maintaining and expanding the Schengen provisions for free movement of people across the EU borders, on fine-tuning agricultural policy to keep European farmers afloat and on reducing regulations for the sake of a better business environment. Pretty cut and dried.
However, youtube’s cleverly programmed offering of other videos that might interest a visitor based on what you have just viewed then put the following link in front of me: Viktor Orban: Everyone will agree with me and not with your Left wing lies
I opened that and was astonished at what I saw. This was the speech that Viktor Orban had not wanted to make, because he did not want to create a scandal in the Parliament. But after he was viciously attacked by Ursula von der Leyen and a couple of her minions in the moments after his report of the Presidency, he answered in extemporaneous manner all the insults and lies about himself and his country that the European Commission President had delivered. His replies all were based in numbers and verifiable facts. He condemned the ad hominem attacks from VdL and kept his own remarks at the high level of debate.
Orban opened by saying that no Commission President before von der Leyen would have dared to engage in partisan politics openly before the chamber as she had just done. The job of the Commission as stated in the foundation documents of the Union is to protect its Constitution not to engage in partisan politics or to shut up all those with different views on given issues from the Commission.
He asked how the President dared to question the legitimacy of Hungary’s deputies in Parliament over their winning only 45% of the popular votes in their country, when her own party in Germany only gathered 30%.
He asked how she dared to make a fuss over the number of Russians working under work permits in Hungary (7,000) when there are 300,000 such workers in her own Germany, 100,000 such workers in Spain and 60,000 Russian workers in France.
He asked how she dared to criticize Hungary for its imports of hydrocarbons from Russia, when other EU countries imported more Russian petroleum in 2023 than before the invasion of Ukraine and when they bought in the last year more than $8 billion in refined petroleum products from India, knowing full well that the crude oil behind these products came from Russia.
He asked how the European Institutions can be called democratic when his own bloc of Patriots for Europe, which now counts about one-third of all MEPs, was not given a single ministerial portfolio by von der Leyen.
I will not introduce here more of his debating points, which, had she any sense of honor, would have seen Frau von der Leyen slink out of the hall in reptilian style. I leave to you, valued readers, the pleasure of discovering in this video why I say that Viktor Orban is the most courageous, the most experienced and the most intelligent statesman in Western Europe.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024