FM Szijjarto: No Hungarian Election Has Seen Such Blatant Foreign Intelligence Interference

Such shameless, open, and aggressive foreign intelligence interference has never before occurred in a Hungarian parliamentary election, even though the situation in 2022 was not simple either, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in Nagykata, on Thursday.

According to a statement issued by Hungary's foreign ministry, FM Szijjarto emphasized at a public forum in the town that the upcoming election is a matter of national destiny not only for Hungary but also for Ukraine, since the current government does not want to enter the war, does not want to hand over people’s money, and does not support the neighboring country’s accession to the European Union.

Peter Szijjarto, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Photo: MTI/Tamas Vasvari 

And therefore they are doing everything they can to influence the election. Look, I have been through a number of election campaigns myself, but such shameless, open, and aggressive foreign intelligence interference has never occurred in a Hungarian parliamentary election—even though they were active in 2022 as well, and back then they were even active in Washington,

 – he said.

“There is, of course, a part of this interference that is not visible to the public, and here we are also defending ourselves with tools that are not visible to the public, day in and day out. Then there are the very visible elements. One such example is the oil blockade,” he continued.

"In Brussels they are putting on a show, as if von der Leyen writes a letter to Zelenskiy, and Zelenskiy writes a letter to von der Leyen. But they speak on the phone five times a day. They meet at least once a week, and here they act as if the Ukrainians have decided something and the people in Brussels are tinkering to solve it. But that is not what happened—they sat down, came up with it, and agreed on it: the Berlin–Brussels–Kyiv axis,” he said.

In Berlin, they cannot tolerate that the prime minister of a Central European country acts on the basis of Hungarian interests rather than German interests on key issues (…) What do they want from Brussels? War, migration, gender. And they know full well that there is one country that can resist this—that is us. And then there are the Ukrainians, for whom it is about EU membership, the war, and the money,

 – he listed.

FM Szijjarto underlined that the oil blockade had failed because the Hungarian government was prepared. For that reason, an attempt was made to create a total energy blockade by having the Ukrainian army target the Russian section of the TurkStream natural gas pipeline with dozens of drones.

According to him, this is particularly serious amid disruptions to energy supplies caused by the war in Iran, yet this attempt has also failed.

And now there is this new intelligence revelation, when it turns out that, with the personal involvement of a Hungarian journalist, foreign services are wiretapping the Hungarian foreign minister. I put it this way because this is not a personal matter, but an attack against Hungarian sovereignty,

 – he said.

All this “with the involvement of a Hungarian journalist who calls Anita Orban a friend, and who claims that in the next foreign ministry he will decide who gets to work there. In your view, what kind of sovereign policy would that be, when in a foreign ministry it is someone cooperating with foreign services who decides who should work there? What kind of sovereign policy would that be?” he asked.

Cover photo: Peter Szijjarto, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Photo: MTI)