According to Justice Minister Judit Varga, after Momentum MEP Anna Donáth’s leaked statements, it is clear that the opposition accused the Orbán Government of building a dictatorship due to the coronavirus legislation knowing full well that not a single one of those accusations was true.

In a comment posted on the Minister’s Facebook account on Wednesday, she responded to Momentum Member of the European Parliament Anna Donáth’s leaked video.

“There was a moment at the end of the video when the Momentum MEP reveals at an internal séance that while they were perfectly aware that the purpose of the coronavirus legislation was the management of a health care emergency situation, Momentum, too, ‘regrettably fell in’ with the rest of the entire Hungarian opposition doing nothing in the midst of a global pandemic other than accusing the Orbán Government at all local and international forums of building a dictatorship” Ms. Varga wrote.

In her post, the Justice Minister recalled that in the spring the local and international press was full of reports claiming that with the ‘enabling act’ the Hungarian government had been given authorisation without any temporal restriction. The local and international media additionally drew parallels with terrible historical eras, and alarmed the public with rumours that there will be no more elections in Hungary and accused the cabinet of wanting to eliminate democracy.

They did so whilst knowing full well that not a word of those accusations was true, Ms. Varga stressed, adding that meanwhile the government and the Hungarian people worked hard together to minimise the number of those whose lives and jobs could be at risk.

The Minister said what Momentum’s Brussels representative “blurted out” about the “closing down” of Parliament is also quite telling. In Ms. Varga’s view, this is again proof of the fact that Brussels decision-makers – rather than believing their own eyes, the laws passed and elected national governments – base their conclusions related to Hungary on fake non-governmental organisations’ “objective” findings, the pre-fabricated panels of liberal journalists and the knowingly false accusations of the domestic opposition.

“Tavares, Sargentini, Jourová. The list could go on…” the Minister wrote.

Ms. Varga highlighted that, naturally, not a word of the opposition’s cries of ‘dictatorship’ was true, and not only will there be, but there have already been elections in Mohács, Karcag and Szerencs. And at these elections, the Hungarian people clearly showed that they do not believe the politics pursued by the opposition in Brussels and here on the foundations of fake news, the Minister pointed out in her post.

In the video, Ms. Donáth said, among others, that in the context of the enabling act her primary duty was to make people understand that it is not because of the law that “there will be a dictatorship here all of a sudden,” given that the government did not do anything that it would not have otherwise been able to do in a health care emergency with its two-thirds majority.

In the video, the opposition MEP said in its very first statements Momentum was wrong to label the legislation a dictatorship law. Later, however, they followed the narrative that rather than talking about an enabling act, they should instead stress that “the System of National Cooperation has been around for ten years, and it keeps eroding the rule of law”. At the same time, she admitted that Momentum had ‘regrettably blended into” everyone else’s cries of ‘dictatorship’.

(Ministry of Justice / MTI)