The cartoonist of Dutch business daily Het Financieele Dagblad has drawn a middle finger on the Hungarian and Polish flags. Hungary’s ambassador at The Hague, Andras Kocsis, turned to the editorial staff to reply to the opinion piece, which the paper has declined.
The Hungarian Magyar Nemzet newspaper found that Het Financieele Dagblad, a Dutch daily business magazine, published an opinion piece on Monday regarding the EU’s financial package which was passed this summer, but has not been implemented yet. According to the Dutch author of the article, Hungary and Poland are threatening to veto the nearly two thousand-billion-euro package, because they object to the rule of law criteria, due to the fact that “they have been violating the principles of rule of law for years”.
The article was accompanied by a caricature portraying the Hungarian and Polish flags adorned with a middle finger.
Hungary’s ambassador at The Hague, Andras Kocsis, turned to the editors to offer some sort of reply to the allegations, but the paper refused this.
Mr Kocsis also gave a detailed account of what happened on Twitter.
Therefore, the embassy in The Hague published the repressed opinion on its own website. Here, the ambassador wrote: “The simplification of European debates is embodied by the middle finger portrayed on national flags, as in Ms De Vries’ October 19 opinion piece’s illustration; it’s not just a source of embarrassment, but reveals a complete misunderstanding of the argument.”
He added: “We aren’t extorting anyone in the negotiations regarding the EU’s years-long budget and recovery fund. Quite the opposite in fact. In July 2020, the European Council made a decision on the mechanism to protect the budget and thereby strengthen rule of law. Unfortunately, however, certain Member States and the European Parliament are trying to reopen the European Council’s July agreement, thus jeopardizing the approval of the package.”
“Those who never actually supported the recovery of Europe’s economy now demand a rule of law criteria that does not even exist in the European Council’s set of consequences. It’s merely an excuse to tear apart the agreement” – Mr Kocsis said.
In his article, Ambassador Andras Kocsis also points out that the source of the conflict between Hungary and our European partners is not really the rule of law, but the ideological conflict between liberal and Christian democracy. As he notes, the Hungarian government is firmly in favor of national sovereignty; its guiding principle is Christianity rather than migration, and its focus is on family.
This is not the first time the Western media refuses to publish Hungary’s position. At the end of September the German Der Tagesspiegel newspaper declined a request by Zoltan Kovacs, Hungary’s state secretary for international communications, to publish his reply.