The International “Tisza Islands” meeting was held in Munich on Aug. 30-31, but a speech given by Attila Gáspárik, a Transylvanian actor and Tisza Party sympathizer, is just hitting the headlines.
Other speakers included those close to Tisza’s campaign, including one female economist, Mária Zita Petschnig, who opposes Orbán’s family benefit programs.
In his speech, Gáspárik went on a long-winded rant, insulting fellow Transylvanians, including famous writers; questioned the legitimacy of nation-states; and spoke disparagingly about Transylvanians in general, Mandiner reports.
Previously, Gáspárik stated about Péter Magyar, leader of the Tisza Party: “I feel that many people are looking with confidence and hope at Péter Magyar’s political activity from Transylvania, and he will have enough to do here to help clean up the intellectual mess that Fidesz has caused here by building up its clientele.”
Gáspárik asked attendees, “If you don’t pay taxes, then why do you vote? What does it have to do with you?” he asked, taking aim at Fidesz allowing ethnic Hungarians living outside the borders of Hungary to gain citizenship and vote.
He also had some bad news for those ethnic Hungarians in Romania who stick to the importance of nation-states. Those who think in terms of nation-states, he said, do not take into account that “minorities cannot fit into a nation-state” and “if Romania were to ever truly build a nation-state,” Transylvanian Hungarians would either have to go to Germany to wash dishes or be “non-thieving Romanians” in Hungary for the rest of their lives.
After questioning the talent of writers Sándor Márai and Albert, he then insulted all Kossuth Prize-winning Transylvanian artists collectively, who, in his opinion, were all unknown and only received the recognition for political reasons.
“They tell us who the writer is, who the poet is, who the artist is. So, for example, people from Transylvania received Kossuth awards, which even in a well-equipped newspaper editorial office it would take ten minutes to find out who they were,” he said.
He even reportedly compared high-ranking officials in Hungary to Germany’s Sonderkommandos in World War II.
In a final statement, he glorified Trianon to those gathered with what could only be called a tasteless joke: “In fact, Hungary’s old dream of a unified Hungarian state, without minorities, was realized in Trianon,” he said, referencing the post-WWI treaty that saw Hungary lose two-thirds of its territory.
Meanwhile, Tisza, the main contender against Fidesz in next year’s parliamentary elections, is scrambling to contain a data leak impacting some 18,000 users of the party’s mobile app. Among the data leaked was that of one of its admins, a Ukrainian developer, Myroslav Tokar, who works for app development company PettersonApps.
This has aroused concerns that Péter Magyar used a Ukrainian company to develop the app, thus presumably transferring the data of Hungarian citizens to Ukraine.
The CEO of PettersonApps is Oleh Ostroverkh, a supporter of Zelensky and a member of the supervisory board of the NGO Defense Robotics UA, writes Mandiner. This NGO has close ties with the Ukrainian army’s “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion, particularly in the development, deployment, and tactical testing of ground-based drones.
Yet another leak hurting Tisza is related to its plan to hike taxes on Hungarians once elected. Balázs Orbán, PM Orbán’s political director, posted on X that the so-called champion of free speech was busy trying to shut down negative press, even forcefully.
According to him, “Zoltán Fekete-Szalóky, editor-in-chief of Index, the outlet that published Tisza’s leaked tax plans, Péter Magyar repeatedly harassed their journalists, even phoning one while on vacation and shouting at him over an article.”
