Věra Jourová suffers from severe Hungarophobia and despises the Hungarian people – Szijjártó

The Vice-President of the European Commission "has demonstrated several times in recent years that she suffers from severe Hungarophobia, and quite simply looks down on the Hungarian people", Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said at a joint press conference with Moldovan Foreign Minister Mihai Popsoi on Friday, MTI reports.

"We take umbrage at the way she has described the supporters of Hungary's ruling party. But we also take offense at the way she talks about the Hungarian people and Hungary in general. It may be unusual for her, but in Hungary the government was democratically elected by the people," he said.

A few days ago, while outlining the European Commission's plans for reform, Věra Jourová said it was "unacceptable to have the security of 460 million EU citizens threatened because of three and a half million Fidesz voters".

Jourová also mentioned that the body would move away from unanimous decision-making towards qualified majority voting, meaning that there would be fewer areas in which vetoes could be used. Responding to this on Friday, Szijjártó said that this would mean that the Hungarian government would not be able to oppose EU decisions which would seriously damage Hungarian national interests.

"Věra Jourová should be ashamed of her performance in the past years, because the European Union is in a much worse state than before the current Commission took office, and Jourová has played a major role in this," he said.

The statements made by the Commission Vice-President were also criticized by Balázs Orbán, the Prime Minister's political adviser, on Thursday. "On behalf of Hungary, I would like to reject these statements made by Věra Jourová. He added that what we should think about certain international issues should not be dictated from the outside," because in his view the Hungarians have only come out badly from similar situations in the past thousand years.

At the press conference, the Foreign Minister also reacted to a speech by US Ambassador David Pressman given last week. He said it should be viewed "as a statement by a left-wing political activist" and reminded the ambassador that when talking about undermining trust within NATO, he should bear in mind how many of his fellow citizens were evacuated from Afghanistan by Hungarians during the withdrawal from the country.

Speaking at an event organized by the Central European University (CEU), its Democracy Institute and the US Embassy on 14 March to mark the 25th anniversary of Hungary's accession to NATO, Pressman said that Hungary is "an ally that labels and treats the United States an “adversary” while making policy choices that increasingly isolate it from friends and allies (...) and is doing things that undermine trust and friendship".

Pressman also addressed the crushing of press freedom, the growing number of oligarchs, the distribution of state advertisements, the enrichment of people close to the government, and also expressed concern about the ever closer and expanding cooperation between Hungary and Russia.