The Hungarian government does not need U.S. congressional delegations to lecture it on what should happen in Hungary, because only the Hungarian people can decide on this, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó warned in Brussels on Monday.
At a press conference following the EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting, Szijjártó responded to a journalist who had asked him about the visit to Budapest of U.S. senators at the request of U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman. The move was instigated to exert pressure on Hungary to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership application.
“I would like to ask that we try to find in the chronicles which was the last Hungarian parliamentary delegation received by a U.S. minister in the United States,” Szijjártó said.
He further stressed that when similar delegations had been received in the past, it was as if “we had enrolled in a course on statecraft, and during the meeting, we had a very comprehensive lecture on how Hungary should be governed.”
Over the weekend, a delegation of three U.S. senators, Jeanne Shaheen (D), Chris Murphy (R), and Thom Tillis (R) visited the Hungarian parliament to urge it to sign off on Sweden’s NATO bid.
“Now, the situation is that the Hungarian people will decide this, and we will implement it. Fortunately, in the last 14 years, we have been the ones who have been able to do it, and we hope that this will continue for a while,” he added.
“We don’t need US congressional delegations to lecture us on what should or should not happen in Hungary,” he reiterated.
Szijjártó said that the decision not to receive the U.S. delegation at a government level was also proven correct by the topics that the members of the congressional delegation raised in their press conference the day before, because there were few bilateral issues among them, and they clearly wanted to discuss Hungarian domestic politics and EU affairs — matters, he insisted, were none of their business.
