A highly unusual double interview appeared in Válasz a few days ago. The participants were Zsolt Németh, who is described in his Wikipedia entry as “a man who has had a key role in the formation of Fidesz’s foreign and national policies,” and Iván Szent-Iványi, one of SZDSZ’s founders and the party’s foreign policy expert. Such encounters are practically non-existent in Viktor Orbán’s regime. Just as there is no opportunity for dialogue in parliament, there is no discussion of current trends in Hungarian foreign policy either. In the last ten years Hungary’s complicated and most of the time baffling foreign policy has been questioned in scientific journals and in the media, but I haven’t encountered the kind of discussion of key foreign policy issues that we witnessed in this interview, conducted by András Stumpf.
Foreign observers have always considered Németh a pillar of Atlanticism, the belief in close ties among the United States, Canada, and Europe, not just in terms of political, economic, and defense issues but also from the point of view of shared values. Zsolt Németh, as we see in this interview, still claims to be an atlantist despite his full support of Viktor Orbán’s foreign policy.
Németh, who is exactly Viktor Orbán’s age, has had a distinguished parliamentary and government career over the years. He served as undersecretary of foreign affairs between 1998 and 2002 and again between 2010 and 2014. During his first stint as undersecretary I had the distinct feeling that he was the Fidesz watchdog, through whom Orbán could have direct oversight and influence on the everyday functioning of the ministry. If Németh ever aspired to become foreign minister, he had to have been disappointed. In 2010 he again ended up only as the deputy to Foreign Minister János Martonyi. Four years later he even had to give that position up. Today Németh is the chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs. His influence in this capacity is negligible.
István Szent-Iványi, five years older than Németh, was an active member of the small political opposition in the 1980s. As one of the founders of SZDSZ, he became a member of parliament in 1990 and four years later, when Gyula Horn’s MSZP-SZDSZ coalition government was formed, he was named undersecretary of foreign affairs under Foreign Minister László Kovács. Between 2004 and 2009 he was an SZDSZ member of the European Parliament. In January 2010, only a few months before the huge Fidesz electoral victory, he was appointed ambassador to Slovenia. Surprisingly, he was allowed to serve in Ljubljana until 2015. Since that time he has become a vocal critic of Viktor Orbán’s foreign policy.
István Szent-Iványi
The impetus on Németh’s part for a debate on foreign policy was Szent-Iványi’s new book, Quo Vadis Hungaria?—Merre tartasz Magyarország? in which he openly advocates for “a new, comprehensive foreign policy strategy whose most important goal is to restore the unequivocal western orientation of our homeland.”
I guess I don’t have to explain that Németh finds Szent-Iványi’s criticism unfair and biased. As he put it, the book shows “Hungarian foreign policy reflected in a distorted mirror.” I would have been interested to know what distortions Németh found in the book, but we didn’t get a direct answer. Instead, he complained about the lack of coverage of the “nemzetpolitika” (national policy), which concerns itself with minority rights of Hungarians living in the neighboring countries. This issue seems to be central to what sets the two sides apart. Németh, a Hungarian nationalist with close ties to Transylvania, is convinced that the basic treaties Hungary signed with neighboring countries before the country could join the European Union and NATO “sacrificed the interests of the Hungarian minorities on the altar of integration.” It is hard for a person to be an atlantist if he looks upon integration as something inherently injurious to national interests, since integration is part and parcel of Atlanticism.
Zsolt Németh
This initially theoretical discussion of minority rights quickly moved to Ukrainian-Hungarian relations, where the Orbán government is subordinating essential global foreign policy initiatives of the Atlantic alliance to “national policy” considerations when it blocks NATO-Ukraine council meetings. Németh admits that much when he claims that “Hungary has no other instrument” at its disposal. At the same time he insists that Hungarian policy toward Ukraine “has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin and the kind of manipulation and diversionary tactics the Russian government practices.” One must take this last claim with a grain of salt.
But Németh goes even further. He objects to any relationship between NATO and Ukraine because “the debate is about Ukrainian democracy and the rule of law.” At this point András Stumpf, the moderator, said that Orbán’s Hungary is the last country that should raise the issue of the rule of law after the Sargentini Report, the treatment of Central European University, or the asylum given to Mikola Gruevski. This was obviously a sensitive topic, which Németh tried to avoid. He never countered Stumpf’s charge of a Hungarian “democracy deficit.” Instead, he complained that Szent-Iványi misidentifies Fidesz as a far-right party and equates present-day Hungary with Poland. He portrays Hungary as a country that shows no solidarity, “as if we endanger European unity.” It is an oversimplification, Németh said, to describe the situation as divided into two camps: the federalist and “us with our delirious ideas about sovereignty…. There is a third possibility,” which apparently Fidesz follows. At least this is Németh’s claim.
At that point the conversation moved to Fidesz’s place on the ideological spectrum of parties and movements in Europe. Szent-Iványi pointed out that far-right camp is wide and that “Fidesz has become a relative of AfD, Le Pen, and Austrian Chancellor Kurz.” That must have hurt because Németh kept returning to the subject, claiming that the politicians of these far-right parties might hold Viktor Orbán up as an exemplar but that the Fidesz leaders have nothing to do with them. How many cases can we cite when Orbán glowingly talked about the Austrian Freedom Party’s Heinz-Christian Strache, Matteo Salvini, head of the Northern League, or Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party of Freedom?
The final topic of conversation was Gruevski’s escape from Macedonia with Hungarian assistance. Németh’s argument was that Gruevski was very helpful in stanching the flow of migrants heading toward Hungary, which is blatantly untrue. When it came to the question of why it was in Hungary’s interest to abet the escape of a man who opposed settling the issue of Macedonia’s name for the sake of integration, Németh couldn’t answer. Saying that Orbán “stood up for the rights of his friend” is surely not an adequate reply from a man who is supposedly steeped in the intricacies of foreign policy and diplomacy.
After this discussion, I came to the conclusion that Németh’s claim to be an ardent atlantist was most likely never true. He is a man for whom “Hungarians first” trumps every other consideration. (And yes, the pun was intentional.)
