The recent case of Hungarian leftist MEP Katalin Cseh is a textbook example of how the European mainstream decides who can be considered democratic and who is dictatorial, Magyar Hírlap columnist Péter G. Fehér writes.
Momentum party MEP Katalin Cseh was banned from China, blacklisted in Beijing. After the EU ordered punitive measures against four Chinese officials for human rights abuses reported in Xinjiang, China imposed sanctions on 10 individuals and four EU institutions, and as it happens, Cseh was one of them.
According to Cseh, lawyers from the European Parliament (EP) are investigating the latest move by the Chinese dictatorial regime. I would be more enthusiastic about this immeasurable zeal if these white-collar, educated people, who are not exactly social workers, pursued with such vehemence documents proving, for example, how the Romanian state deported and expelled Hungarians from Transylvania in the last hundred years.
Of course, there is no such thing; it is safe to say that the Union’s institutions, if necessary, spend uncounted amounts of money to uncover cases tens of thousands of kilometers away instead of applying the same zeal to protecting the rights of national minorities in their own back yard.
Such an initiative cannot be expected from Momentum, a party that has always been cynical about the matter, and whose president has been campaigning in Transylvania for a Romanian party that is far from free of anti-Hungarian sentiment. Anna Donáth, another MEP of Momentum, wanted to convert ethnic Hungarians living north of us into proud Slovaks.
The collection of more than one million signatures under the Minority SafePack Initiative (MSPI) was unsuccessful in ensuring the protection of the rights of Hungarian communities across the border and of indigenous national minorities in the EU in general. Despite meeting the required conditions, the European Commission (EC) decided that the protection of minority rights is the responsibility of individual member states.
EU minority policy, like much else, has become an instrument of the power game in Brussels. Beijing is being criticized while Kyiv has been given a free hand in the cultural genocide of Hungarians in Transcarpathia. The Ukrainian leadership did not have to face so much as a bad word for enacting a law that will soon prohibit the usage of any language except Ukrainian.
Hungarian MEP Cseh branded China a dictatorship but did not do the same with Kyiv. Why would she do that? Because Ukraine stands against Russia, and the EU has also imposed sanctions on Moscow over the secession of Crimea, the fighting in eastern Ukraine, human rights issues and a political system it considers to be authoritarian.
Katalin Cseh did not say a single word when the Catalan independence movement was severely suppressed by the Spanish gendarmerie because the Madrid administration — part of the European mainstream — had to be supported. Not to mention the fact that Brussels took the brutal crushing of the 2006 Budapest demonstrations as almost natural. No wonder there, as everything happened on the instructions of their great friend (then Socialist prime minister) Ferenc Gyurcsány.
This is the theoretical foreign policy of those who constantly hold Hungary accountable for the rule of law. A dictator is anyone who is considered as such in Brussels and thus judged by the European Court of Justice.
Title image: European Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova addresses the plenary at the European Parliament in Brussels, Thursday, March 25, 2021. (Yves Herman, Pool via AP)
