Addressing a demonstration in Budapest on Saturday, Gergely Gulyás, Head of the Prime Minister’s Office, said: “We want to say no to a kind of politics whose clear and explicit aim is to harm Hungary — not the government, but the Hungarian people.”
According to MTI, Gulyás spoke at a protest organized by the National Resistance Movement and the Civic Union Forum (COF) against recent comments by Tisza Party MEP Kinga Kollár in which she cast the impact of the freeze on Hungary’s EU funds as a positive development.
He said: “It only takes a bit of good nature and minimal human decency to see that this is not a matter of left and right or ideological debate”.
“Tisza’s MEPs, who each make a salary of about 7 million forints (EUR 17,100), have themselves provided irrefutable evidence that they’re working … to make Hungarians poorer,” Gulyás said.
He said Tisza’s MEPs were working to prevent the healthcare sector, teachers and businesses from getting the money they are entitled to.
Tisza, he said, believed that the worse it was for the country, the better it was for them, because they believed that the more damage they could do to the country, the better their chances would be in next year’s general election.
Gulyás said that instead of calling for Kollar’s resignation, Tisza had stood by her “because they all do the same thing”.
“They don’t care about God, family or the homeland, only power,” Gulyás said, adding that Tisza was prepared to harm Hungarians if it meant “getting even an inch closer to power”.
He said Tisza leader Peter Magyar did not care whether he was “applauding [Prime Minister] Viktor Orban … or [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen from the front row … all he cares about is being in the front row.”
Gulyás also said Magyar was not held accountable for any “crimes he committed” because he was “above the law” and “clings to his immunity” as an MEP.
“We had already assumed that Hungarian interests don’t matter to Tisza, as evidenced by the fact that in 2024 they joined the European People’s Party which had filed a lawsuit to deprive Hungary of EU funding,” Gulyás said, adding that Tisza was also backing Ukraine’s EU accession even though this went against Hungarian interests.
Gulyás said that while it was clear that Tisza’s actions were driven by its aim to boost its chances in the election, the most important question was “why Brussels does what it does”.
He said the answer was that Brussels wanted to replace Hungary’s anti-migration and pro-peace government with one that “will go against Hungarian interests whenever Brussels wants it to”, supports the war and fast-tracking Ukraine’s EU accession and “would give up some sovereignty in Brussels’s favour at any time”.
“But this is Budapest and not Brussels, Hungary and not the EU, and this is a sovereign country, not a province of the United States of Europe, and decisions here are made by the Hungarian people…” Gulyás said.
