The president, who took office a year ago, filled an institution believed to be purely protocol-based with new content. Who would have thought that a president of the republic is good for everything!
"We Hungarians inherited self-respect, tolerance, survival and the ability to fight from our grandparents and parents, who lived through the 20th century, which in retrospect seems unsurvivable. Thank you and thanks for it! But our ancestors didn't teach us that it's not enough if the port is good, you have to be able to sell it on the market. Our saying is also revealing: good wine does not need a company! Of course! I say: good wine is also needed for the company! It is an honor to be part of one of the companies of this good wine, Hungary," said Katalin Novák, the Hungarian president who took office just one year ago, in his inaugural speech.
A new president for new times
You don't have to read deeply between the lines to notice: the president of the republic did not step onto the stage to hear the same voice from more than one speaker - but to show our small country, which part of the world has learned to respect, fear or it should be a little easier to hate and love. The new president speaks a different language, figuratively at home, and literally in the outside world: English, German, French and Spanish -
but mainly rounder than what we were used to during decades of governance by hard and proud men.
Katalin Novák did not become an alternative to Viktor Orbán, a counterweight, plan B, and so on. Together with the government, he is waiting for the most successful directions of Hungarian diplomacy at the moment, negotiating with Israel and Turkey, making friends with the Balkans and Central Asia, relentlessly pursuing the cause of peace and Hungarian family policy. At the same time, he is just far enough away from Fidesz to be seen: in his person, an autonomous politician who sees beyond party considerations has come to the head of the legal order. Someone who would raise teachers' salaries regardless of EU funds, would not delay Sweden's NATO admission, says that the Russians should withdraw from Ukrainian territories,
he can easily reject even the deputy prime minister's own bill if he considers it to be insufficient in quality,
and he can speak sensibly, as a natural ally, to those with whom he has not really succeeded in the last couple of difficult years.
Since the outbreak of the war, Katalin Novák has visited all the other Visegrád countries, including Poland, and she conducted a V4 presidential summit flawlessly, without any kind of Putin pincushion; broke the roaring silence between Italy and Hungary since the right-wing election victory; Under the leadership of Slovenia, he held a friendly summit in both Ljubljana and Budapest despite the fact that in the meantime the Hungarian government's allies at the level of the government and the president were out of power; Together with the Green President of Austria and the Bucharest Nine, which represents NATO's eastern wing, he declared that Ukraine's minority policy was unacceptable; and successfully opened communication channels in three particularly difficult relations, the German, the Romanian and the Ukrainian.
Of course, foreign policy does not directly put the bread on the table of Hungarians - but those who have followed the connections between the EU negotiations and the forint exchange rate in the past year, perhaps already understand the price of isolation. And in order to solve it, it is mostly necessary to talk - and Katalin Novák did a great service to the country in this. As he promised last May: he opens doors and looks for keys.
The year was also active at home
And while the president of the republic negotiates abroad perhaps more than ever before, at home it feels like we have a president. Namely, someone who is close, who smiles and who can be reached. The one who bakes stangli for the pope brings fish soup to the outgoing Czech president, because his mind goes to that sróf, like a normal Hungarian housewife. Anyone who sits down on a stool in the middle of a small village listens to what is happening in the most unfortunate regions of the country. The one who flies with his son to a soccer match on a low-level plane, and with whom you can also go hiking, of course, only for those who can handle the 25 kilometers up Dobogókő. From whom it sounds quite motherly in the New Year's greeting that "the time has come not for discouragement, but for holding together". The one who grants pardon to the Hunnian defendants in such a way that the pardon is in the meantime
with its form of execution, it makes it clear: for György Budaházy, he is not a heroic defender of the nation,
he is by no means an innocent sheep - he has only confessed enough in the slow and imprecise grinding mills of the Hungarian justice system for his detention to be suspended. The one who stands up to the most tried and tested interviewers from two non-government media (if it's up to him, three), and in the columns of a leading Italian liberal daily, with death-defying naturalness, in the eyes of the foreign policy cyclone surrounding Hungary, calls the Italian prime minister his old friend. Because why wouldn't you? Does a smiling Calvinist mother have enemies?
After all, it even has a pope - the visit of Pope Francis at the end of April culminated the church diplomatic offensive that the government entrusted to the president as a matter of national unification, and in which the celebration of Hungarian Reformed Unity Day in Gyulafehérvár with the encouragement of Middle Eastern Christian leaders in Jerusalem fit perfectly. The papal visit - one of the greatest successes of Hungarian diplomacy in the last few years - would not have been the way it was if Katalin Novák, who spoke with the pope in her native language, had not played the role of host. There are many good and smart politicians in this country, but the fact that we are "allied" with the Pope, together we protect human life, women and men separately and together, our persecuted Christian brothers, but those who think differently and live differently his freedom too", sounded authentic only from the president of the republic and only after such a year.
Of course, the president of the republic is still primarily a protocol function. He is not the one to bring inflation down to single digits, he is not able to carry out educational reforms even if he really wanted to, and - as can be seen in the example of Poland - he is not able to bring home the EU funds in a bag either.
He will not be - just as no professional politician will ever be - simply one of us, even if he wanted to;
politics is a profession that involves a life completely different from that of a single person and requires a completely different way of thinking. And, of course, there are those for whom the Sándor Palace will always remain a functionless, expensive political repository. But those who visited the past year with open eyes can look back and be amazed: who would have thought what a president of the republic is good for?
Featured image: MTI
