The planned Budapest visit program of the Culture and Education Committee of the European Parliament (EP) disregards even the most basic expectations of balance and diversity, stated Tamás Deutsch, head of the Fidesz EP representative group, in a letter to Sabine Verheyen, the chairperson of the relevant committee, which was It was also delivered to MTI.
November 2–4. Regarding the planned visit to Budapest between
The head of the Fidesz EP representative group called it regrettable and incomprehensible that the expert committee almost completely ignored these proposals. According to his words, as a result, an unbalanced visit program can be realized, in which a "grotesque disproportion" can be observed in favor of political actors, activists, institutions, journalists and civil organizations critical of the government, oppositionists, leftists and liberals.
"As a member of several former European Parliament fact-finding delegations, I am convinced that a delegation of an EP committee can only fulfill the role of fact-finding if, during its visit, it examines the issues affected by the mission from several angles and compiles the program of the visit as balanced as possible." Deutsch said.
The fact is that, in addition to around two dozen "militantly anti-government", left-wing and liberal politicians, civil activists, journalists and people working in the cultural sector, during the visit only a few government actors were consulted, completely ignoring the Hungarian cultural and media - and the representatives of the right-wing, bourgeois, national, conservative and Christian-democratic tendencies and workshops of the civil world, cannot give an authentic, objective and complete picture of reality - he emphasized. (According to Mandiner, they meet with an editor of Direkt36, a telex journalist, an employee of Tilos Rádió, the editor-in-chief of Klubrádió, and finally a Euronews employee...)
The EP representative underlined that only a politically and ideologically biased report will be compiled based on the extremely one-sided program. The way the visit program was put together confirms the suspicion that the imbalance of the program can be explained not simply by the lack of the expected prudence, but by a conscious political intention, he wrote.
Tamás Deutsch sent the letter addressed to the chairman of the committee to the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to whom he indicated that, in his opinion, the culture and education committee's November program in Budapest was unbalanced and biased.
"I am convinced that impartiality and pluralism are inviolable principles that the bodies of the EP must adhere to in all circumstances, and that the work of the European Parliament's fact-finding delegations should not be used as a tool or appropriated by any political group," Tamás Deutsch said in his letter.
Source: Magyar Hírlap/MTI
Photo: Tamás Kovács