Open letter to the MEPs of the Hungarian ‘dollar left’

Addressee:

Klára DOBREV (S&D, DK)

Katalin CSEH (RE, Momentum)

Anna DONÁTH (RE, Momentum)

Attila ARA-KOVÁCS (S&D, DK)

Márton GYÖNGYÖSI (NI, Jobbik)

Csaba MOLNÁR (S&D, DK)

Sándor RÓNAI (S&D, DK)

István UJHELYI (S&D, Esély Közösség)

Brussels, 1 July 2023

Dear Fellow Members,

For many years, you have not missed a single opportunity to spread blatant lies and gross slander about your own country in foreign public forums, especially in the European Parliament. Depending on your temperament, you tirelessly present your false accusations against your country as bombastic denunciations, hysterical hate-mongering or angry mantras. Your political behaviour has been judged by the Hungarian electorate on countless occasions: since your claims bear no relation to reality, you have been soundly defeated in the last four parliamentary and four European Parliament elections.

Until recently, it was incomprehensible to many why you are forcing this embarrassing and repulsive practice of denigrating Hungary to the outside world, which is, by the way, politically useless to you. However, after the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections, the big exposure came, which explained your unrepentant behaviour.

Nothing less has been revealed than that the election campaign of the Hungarian left was illegally financed with huge sums of money from America, mostly through an organisation called Action for Democracy. From then on, the left-wing opposition in Hungary can rightly be described as the ‘dollar left’. Investigations by the competent authorities have established that the majority of the illegal foreign campaign funding, worth around HUF 4 billion (at the time approximately EUR 10.3 million), was received by the political organisation of Péter Márki-Zay, the joint left-wing candidate for prime minister, but also by several other left-wing organisations.

And the latest documents from the investigation into the illegal foreign campaign financing of the Hungarian left show that the political organisation of the left-liberal mayor of Budapest, the ‘Kilencvenkilenc Mozgalom’, received more than HUF 500 million (about EUR 1.3 million) in foreign campaign funding. According to the fact-finding investigation, this amount was paid into the bank account of Mozgalom by a single person, namely Gábor Perjés, a member of the Budapest II district council and party colleague of Mayor Gergely Karácsony, in a total of 19 cash payments. Given that, according to his declaration of assets, Gábor Perjés had only HUF 1 million in savings during this period, the question rightly arises as to what source he was able to use to donate HUF 500 million to the Kilencvenkilenc Mozgalom movement of Gergely Karácsony.

At the end of last year, the worst-ever corruption scandal in Brussels was exposed, revealing that left-wing MEPs had been bought by non-European actors. You must have felt uncomfortable that your party colleagues had been exposed, but you declared that corruption, the buying of influence from abroad, was a bad thing.

Now, based on the investigation into the illegal foreign campaign financing of the dollar left, it has become abundantly clear that what happened in Hungary is exactly the same as what happened in the European Parliament, namely that you were bought from outside Europe, just like Eva Kaili, Marc Tarabella and Andrea Cozzolino were.

In the context of the upcoming European Parliament elections, it is reasonable to assume that the Hungarian dollar left will once again resort to the Brussels corruption mechanism, i.e. the acceptance of illegal foreign influence-buying. Illegal foreign interference in the Hungarian electoral process is an affront to Hungarian sovereignty, and foreign interference in the Hungarian European Parliament campaign is an attack on the sovereignty of the EU institutions, in addition to Hungarian sovereignty.

We, therefore, call on you to declare without any delay that you will not resort to illegal means of foreign campaign financing in any form in the 2024 European Parliament election campaign, neither through so-called NGOs nor through companies founded by former left-wing politicians.

Tamás Deutsch MEP

Head of the Fidesz Delegation to the European Parliament