According to Balázs Hankó, it is time for Hungary to consider challenging the recent discriminatory decisions of Brussels in the European Court of Justice.Continue reading
The Green Party chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education has written a letter to the Hungarian Minister for Culture and Innovation urging that the Commission’s proposals on the model universities be incorporated into Hungarian law, Magyar Nemzet reported.
According to the newspaper, the chair of the committee, Nela Riehl (a politician of the Greens/European Free Alliance), is calling, among other things, for the exclusion of Hungarian rectors from the boards of trustees of university foundations. According to her, the Hungarian government should also introduce rules to allow Brussels to decide who can be the heads of Hungarian universities, and NGOs controlled from Brussels should supervise the elections of the boards of university foundations.
Magyar Nemzet reports that the Minister for Culture and Innovation, Balázs Hankó, has already replied to Nela Riehl, in which he recalled that Hungarian MPs in these foundations have been declared to have a conflict of interest, while Ursula von der Leyen, Manfred Weber, and their party colleagues, as well as the Green Party chair who signed the letter, also say that MEPs can easily participate in the work of university foundations.
In other words, the Brussels plan is clear here too: instead of rectors, Brussels’ administrators should sit on the foundations, and Brussels and the NGOs that are now being pushed out of America should say who the university leaders in Hungary should be, what the students should learn, who they can work with, and if they behave, even organize trips abroad, but only to universities where woke and cancel culture is the consciousness-shaper,”
reads the minister’s response, obtained by the paper.
According to Hankó, a procedure that flouts democracy and the rule of law is not far from the European Parliament, nor from the chair of the committee. The minister pointed out that in a recent interview, Nela Riehl admitted that although the Patriots for Europe should have been given the chair post of the committee, it was democratic to take it from them. With this move, she disregarded the votes of millions of people, as well as the third strongest political group, just because the Patriots are the opposition to Brussels. This is how democracy works in Brussels, the minister argued.
It is time for the Patriots to speak up together against the Commission’s illegal decisions that persecute Hungarian students. Universities must be defended against the all-dominant ideology of the Commission,”
Hankó emphasized. He remarked that a new program for Hungarian universities, called Pannónia, had been launched after the institutions were excluded from Erasmus. According to the minister, Pannónia is already more successful than Erasmus.
“Already, in the first autumn semester, three thousand students, teachers, and researchers have been sent to the leading universities not only in Europe but also in the world. With higher scholarships and full credit recognition,” emphasized Hankó, adding that while Brussels excludes, the Pannónia program welcomes, because it also offers opportunities to foreigners studying at the renewed Hungarian universities. The minister also said that the Pannónia program would continue in the spring semester, with the aim of 5,000 students, researchers, and teachers participating, and that students from the Modul University in Vienna, which was recently excluded from Erasmus by Brussels, would also be welcome.
Via Magyar Nemzet, Featured photo via MTI/Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Benko Vivien Cher
