“I've just gotten off the phone with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. I made it clear to him that we could discuss any policy issues only after we've received a guarantee that Slovakia will rescind the legislation threatening ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia with imprisonment, and once they had stipulated that in the future, the lands of our fellow Hungarians living in Slovakia will not be confiscated based on the Beneš Decrees, which are rooted in the concept of collective guilt,” Hungaian prime minister-elect Péter Magyar posted on his Facebook page.
The president of the Tisza Party said that he had confirmed to the Slovak Prime Minister that the Tisza government would work to strengthen Hungarian-Slovak relations and to rebuild the Visegrád Cooperation, but according to Magyar, the clarification and resolution of the above issues must come first.
“I emphasized to Robert Fico that the top priority for any Hungarian government in Slovak-Hungarian relations is the protection of the rights of our fellow Hungarians,” he wrote.
Péter Magyar added that they had agreed to continue their discussion in person in Brussels during the upcoming meeting of the European Council.
In December, Slovak Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini signed an amendment to the Criminal Code containing several new provisions, which, among other things, made it a criminal offence to influence an election campaign through “foreign powers” and to publicly deny the post-World War II settlement. This essentially means that anyone who questions the Beneš Decrees (issued in 1945) could today face imprisonment in Slovakia.
The amendment led to a heated debate in Slovakia at the end of last year about the legality of the Beneš Decrees and the land confiscations carried out under their legal framework—an issue of particular sensitivity for the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. As previously discussed, after World War II, the Czechoslovak state applied the principle of collective guilt to the Hungarian and German residents living within its territory, in many cases depriving them of their real estate, personal property, and homes. The decrees, which were elevated to the force of law, continue to form the unshakable foundation of the Czech and Slovak state systems to this day, even though they would no longer stand up to scrutiny under human rights standards.
The expropriation rules originate from the Beneš Decrees, but it was the Slovak National Council in exile that issued the relevant regulations based on those decrees at the end of the war. In many cases, the expropriations were not carried out, which is what the Slovak state would like to make up for now, decades later. Although this also affects the Hungarian community, the outgoing Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Péter Szijjártó stated at his annual parliamentary committee hearing that they intended to address the issue of the Beneš Decrees—considered a point of tension between the two countries—in a way that would allow for a realistic chance of resolving the matter. In his view, it would not be worth reopening the issue if doing so were to reopen previously “resolved points of conflict,” and it would be good if matters that are sensitive from the Hungarian perspective “did not become the subject of Slovak domestic political battles.” We wrote about the matter in detail here.
Following the Tisza Party's April 12 victory in the parliamentary elections, during his international press conference held the next day, Péter Magyar replied to a question from the Slovak news portal 360tka by stating that he would not compromise on the issue of the Beneš Decrees. Magyar noted that while Robert Fico was a close ally of Viktor Orbán and will likely remain so, he believes that the Slovak and Hungarian heads of government must always strive for cooperation, especially because of the Hungarians living in Slovakia.
“Even if I didn’t want to be on good terms, I would still have to be on good terms with the Slovak leadership.” But to achieve this, certain issues need to be resolved, Magyar emphasized on April 13.
Incoming Foreign Minister Anita Orbán said that her most important task during the new government’s first one hundred days will be to resolve the issue of the Beneš Decrees.
Fico also posted about the conversation on Facebook, but he does not seem to be open minded on this issue; he wrote:
The conversation "clearly showed that the priority of Péter Magyar in Slovak-Hungarian relations are and will be the Beneš Decrees, where we have principally different positions".
Fico also wrote that he had congratulated Magyar and had invited him on an official visit to Slovakia, as he considers the peaceful coexistence of Slovaks and Hungarians in Slovakia to be important. He said he wants to continue cooperating with Hungary on energy security, and therefore would like to know more about the new Hungarian political leadership’s position on restarting the Friendship oil pipeline and on the lawsuit against the RePowerEU regulation, which the Slovak and Hungarian governments filed against the EU due to the halt in Russian gas and oil supplies.
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