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The newly elected Hungarian President, Tamás Sulyok, aims to build trust through mutual listening and understanding, free from prejudice. Speaking in parliament on Monday, he stressed that he is in favor of the widest possible transparency in certain areas of authority, such as medals and pardons.
The new head of state, who is also president of the Constitutional Court, promised to work for a fair balance between fundamental constitutional rights and values. He noted that mutual trust between individuals and social groups is a basic condition for the existence of the state and the nation.
Mutual trust, free from prejudice, is the basis of the unity of the nation,”
he added. Tamás Sulyok also underlined that for him, national constitutional identity and statehood based on popular sovereignty are fundamental constitutional values.
The new head of state stressed that people in difficulty, those who are in a difficult situation through no fault of their own, those who are unable to care for themselves, the suffering, the elderly, the sick, and the lonely can always count on his attention and support.
“With all my actions, I want to express the unity that we Hungarians are proud, European people with a history of more than a thousand years, determined to assert our rights by all means, and that we can do this with conviction, emotion, and humor,” he pointed out.
Photo via MTI/Koszticsák Szilárd
“My Hungarianness is the fundamental movement of my human existence. My mother tongue, my culture, my family, my work, in other words everything is linked to it,” he emphasized, adding that “whoever is Hungarian is also European.”
Sulyok said that he wanted
a Europe where values are more important than interests, where the EU institutions work primarily on legal rather than political issues.
He also mentioned that there are no European values independent of the Member States, but that a European value system can emerge from the constitutional values of the Member States, which is common to all of them.
Sulyok described the national constitutional identity as having a constitutional content, to which legal, cultural, and ideological aspects are also linked. He said that “the fears of our predecessors that after the Treaty of Trianon we would dissolve into a melting pot of other peoples were perhaps never more realistic than today.”
He added that identity is closely linked to the traditional social environment that has developed in the Carpathian Basin over the past millennium, the preservation of which is a basic condition for national existence. The identity of the nationalities living with us is an integral part of national identity, he highlighted.
Presidents of Hungary (from 1990). Graph via MTI
In the new president’s view, sovereignty is conceptually indivisible, and therefore the Member States of the European Union, including Hungary, are not transferring sovereignty to the Union, but competences, and they are doing so because the joint exercise of these competences is more effective than if they were exercised by the Member States themselves. “I am also firmly convinced that there is currently no single European political nation, but that only the political nations of the Member States can be understood as state-building factors,” he said.
Sulyok noted that the Constitutional Court and the institution of the presidency are also outside the branches of state power and that this exclusion is a key issue.
As president, I intend to act as a lawyer within the framework and…the powers defined by the Fundamental Law, in accordance with the values of the Fundamental Law, and in line with my principles,”
he stressed. The new head of state indicated that he was in favor of the broadest possible transparency in certain areas of competence, such as the awarding of medals and pardons.
Via MTI; Featured image via MTI/Máthé Zoltán
