“Defending against the pandemic is the highest priority for millions of Europeans. Decision-makers across Europe are turning all their efforts to protect the lives and health of citizens, and to restart the economy as soon as possible. Meanwhile, for months, the majority of the Manfred Weber-led EPP has been working on regulating, ousting, and suspending the Fidesz MEPs” said Tamás Deutsch concerning the departure of Fidesz, the major ruling party, from the EPP faction.
As the Fidesz politician has indicated, the Fidesz-KDNP (Christian Democratic People’s Party, the official coalition partner of Fidesz) representatives already made it clear in the spring, during the fake news campaign, that they want to focus on protecting the people’s health. “Even then we didn’t want to deal with vile attacks. The same is true now, as we stated in the Group” said Tamás Deutsch who believes that the recently adopted rule of procedure amendments tailored for Fidesz are clearly conflicting with the rule of law. “Yet we get schooled every week about rule of law in the European Parliament. Interestingly, the main EPP megaphones for rule of law didn’t care about, for example, a ban on retroactive consequences”, added the politician. He believes passing these new rules of procedure essentially casts almost two million voters of pro-government MEPs as second-class EU citizens. “And we won’t help you with that. We’ve had enough of this undignified situation!” emphasized Tamás Deutsch.
We also asked the MEP what Fidesz will do now in the EU Parliament. “It turns out that our party does not belong in a place where political distortion is more important than defending against the epidemic. And I don’t want to speculate. We are going to find the place where we can most effectively and efficiently represent Hungarian national interests. The best European formation for us won’t be determined today” he said.
György Hölvényi, a KDNP politician, will remain in the EPP; in connection with this contradiction, Tamás Deutsch also pointed out that Fidesz and KDNP fully agree on the EPP’s decisions impairing the rule of law. “Nonetheless, KDNP was already a member of the EPP’s predecessor” reminded Deutsch. Summarizing the current position regarding the EPP: “Goodbye, Auf Wiedersehen, Minden jót!”