Press release by MEP Tamás Deutsch

Thirty years ago, the Communists imprisoned me in Prague; now some in Brussels want to exclude me. That’s what happens when one stands up for freedom and one’s homeland.

The exclusion initiative exhausts the notion of domestic violence within a political family.

The attack on me is, in fact, Brussels’ revenge for the Hungarian and Polish rejection of the so-called rule of law mechanism. The action of the thirty (MEPs) shows exactly why the forthcoming “rule of law” punitive mechanism should be rejected by all means. What some now plan against me, they will seek to do against Hungary, too; they want to punish us for so-called reasons. 

This political action is also a textbook case of the application of a double standard, as it was Donald Tusk, the president of our party family, who in the spring attacked Viktor Orbán personally and rudely when he called him a Nazi. None of those who initiated my exclusion spoke out then against the shocking and shameful statements of the President of the People’s Party, but now I am threatened with political retaliation because I criticized — without making it personal — a way of thinking.

The initiators certainly have a wry sense of humor to talk about freedom of speech in their exclusion proposal while wanting to punish me precisely because I have expressed my opinion freely.