Berlin. Péter Györkös (57) has been the Hungarian ambassador to Germany since November 2015. From 1988 to 2004 he held various positions in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and accompanied the integration of his country into the EU. In the summer of 1989, as a young speaker, he was involved in the process of thousands of GDR citizens leaving for the West via Hungary. The RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) spoke to him.
Mr Györkös, Hungary is referring to the European Court of Justice against the newly introduced clauses that provide for a reduction in EU financial aid in the event of breaches of the rule of law. What are you hoping for the lawsuit?
There are two elements to the matter. Firstly, it is about ensuring that EU funds are properly allocated and used. Hungary is 100 percent there. Second, there is now an attempt to use this so-called rule of law mechanism to overturn Article 7 of the EU Treaty, which regulates the procedure. We think that constitutional law cannot be replaced by secondary law. The points at which Hungary is attacked have little to do with the values of the EU.
Among other things, it is about freedom of the press, freedom of expression and an independent judiciary.
They want to punish Hungary. We are attacked 20 times a day that there is no freedom of the press in Hungary. I read a dozen German media outlets every day, and I think the Hungarian press landscape is more colorful than the German one. This dispute is not a legal one, but a political one. We would like to have the question of the new mechanism clarified before the European Court of Justice and we look forward to the verdict.
The publicist Anne Applebaum writes in her new book “The Temptation of the Authoritarian” that 90 percent of the media in Hungary are subordinate to the government. Is that correct?
You know, somebody makes a claim that is irrelevant to the facts and it gets passed on as a fact. This is nonsense. In my estimation, when it comes to the distribution of content in Hungary, the opinion critical of the government is slightly ahead in some media, while the more pro-government view is slightly ahead in others. But one of the camps wants to exclusively determine the discourse, and that doesn’t happen in Hungary. That is why we are constantly threatened in the EU: punish, starve, throw out.
Applebaum also writes that Hungary passed a law in March 2020 that allows Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to rule bypassing parliament and imprison journalists for up to five years if they criticize the government’s Corona measures.
Fact ignorance No. 2 and No. 3 by Mrs. Applebaum. This is about the first wave of the corona pandemic. There were special regulations in all EU member states, and to this day you can also see widespread competencies of the Federal Minister of Health or the dispute over the decisions of the Prime Minister’s Conference in Germany. In Hungary, government in a state of emergency ended on June 21, 2020. And yes, there is a paragraph that criminal proceedings can be instituted against persons who endanger human life through false reporting (and who do not criticize the government). Such cases are all resolved in court, no one is simply locked up in any way.
Keyword Corona – Hungary is way ahead when it comes to vaccination in Europe, apparently you haven’t done anything wrong.
Of our nearly ten million inhabitants, around 30 percent have been vaccinated so far. This puts us in second place in the EU and we are very proud of it! It was already clear to us in December that the vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and ordered by the European Commission would not be sufficient. That is why we also ordered the Sinopharm vaccine from China and Sputnik V from Russia, which, by the way, was recommended by the World Health Organization.
Hungary was criticized, at least indirectly, for allowing Sputnik V to “go it alone” without waiting for the EMA result.
Here, too, we are absolutely legally compliant with the EU directives, which state that in crisis situations the member states can freely decide whether their authorities allow additional vaccines. Should we apologize for taking care of the health of our citizens? The EMA consistently recommends Astrazeneca, and Germany stops the vaccine for a short time, then starts it again, and then only for people over 60. That means you obviously have to react flexibly, and that’s what we do. Viktor Orbán is ready to think out of the box, and some people don’t like that.
Poland, the Baltic States and the USA are against the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline, which is supposed to bring Russian natural gas to Germany. How does Hungary feel about this?
This is primarily a German matter that should not be discussed ideologically. Germany is mature enough to decide for itself. We ourselves also purchase Russian gas overland via a pipeline. It works reliably, but we focus on diversification. This means that the more sources, the safer and cheaper the supply for the population and industry. For example, we are now finally getting liquefied natural gas from Croatia. A new LNG terminal has been built on the island of Krk, where gas from all over the world arrives by ship. And we continue to rely on nuclear energy, building two more reactor blocks in our nuclear power plant in Paks by 2030.
In other words, you don’t share Poland’s criticism that Nord Stream 2 will strengthen the military budget in Russia and that people feel threatened?
We respect that the project creates fears in our allies. We stand by our NATO allies fully in the face of geopolitical threats. Hungarian fighter jets secure the airspace over the Baltic States. We have our own historical experiences with Russia. Our position was always at its most difficult when there was a conflict between East and West, and we sat in the middle. We have always suffered from that. We are currently implementing the largest armaments project in history and completely renewing our armed forces technologically. German companies such as Airbus and Rheinmetall are primarily involved.
Germany is not only involved in the Hungarian arms industry. How do you rate the economic relations between the two countries?
Very good. In 2020, we were Germany’s third largest trading partner in Eastern Europe, ahead of Russia, with a movement of 52 billion euros in goods. And the balance was positive. That means we exported more goods to Germany than we imported ourselves. In Hungary there are 6,000 German companies with 300,000 employees. First and foremost, of course, is the auto industry, with Audi in Györ, BMW in Debrecen and Daimler in Kecskemét. But a lot also happens in research and development. We sometimes ask ourselves why there is so much foreign investment from all industrialized countries in Hungary when our rule of law is so bad.
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