The make-up of the European Parliament following the June 9 elections may shift global politics in a “pro-peace” direction, Laszlo Kover, the speaker of parliament, said on Thursday in northern Hungary.
Referring to the concurrent local election campaign in Hungary, he said the focus was on the European election given its national, European and world political significance, adding that the make-up of the EP would have a bearing on the whole European institutional system.
He said it was “natural that people would rather talk about this than who their district candidate is, though I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of this either,” he said in comments to MTI.
More people were likely to vote in the June 9 vote as the two ballots were linked, he added.
Kover said Fidesz MEPs had been on the defensive in relation to EU institutions and the left wing, which had tried to undermine the Hungarian government’s “well-intentioned measures” and its support, resorting to “illegitimate interventions”.
He lamented that far less energy and time had been devoted to Europe-building than in previous cycles.
Regarding the local elections, the speaker said it would be worth assessing how respective right and left-wing party political city mayors had performed over the past thirty years and how given settlements had developed.
Budapest he noted as an example of a city where the left wing took over from a Fidesz metropolitan administration in 2019, adding that financial reserves had been squandered ever since and “nothing was built”.
Gergely Karacsony, Budapest’s mayor, rather than campaigning in Budapest, was helping the left-wing campaign in rural areas, he said.
“They don’t like their country and they don’t like their own community either; no surprise there,” he said.
