Nationalists Blame Hungarians for the Cancellation of Presidential Elections

Petrișor Peiu, AUR’s candidate for prime minister, has attacked Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and RMDSZ leader Hunor Kelemen in a strongly worded opinion piece. According to a political analyst interviewed by the news portal maszol.ro, the message is also aimed at some groups of the governing parties PNL and PSD, that were supposed to shift responsibility for the election scandal onto the RMDSZ and cooperate with the ultranationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR).

Petrișor Peiu described Hunor Kelemen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ), as the “informal” leader of the ruling coalition, who had “shamelessly” admitted that the ruling politicians were behind the cancellation of last year’s presidential elections. In an article published on the gandul.ro website, the AUR senator referred to an earlier interview with the RMDSZ leader, in which the politician from the Hungarian minority said that Romania should not be ashamed of the Constitutional Court’s cancellation of the elections.

Peiu calls Viktor Orbán “the great enemy of Romania,” with whom Kelemen is “intertwined.” The AUR politician writes that the election issue is “becoming a dangerous game controlled from the outside.” In his opinion, “the cooperation between Orbán and Putin” could even be a game played by Moscow to destabilize “our young and immature democracy.” He also wrote that the coalition was “delighted” to enjoy Orbán’s friendship.

Contacted by maszol.ro, political analyst T. János Barabás said that as a connoisseur of Romanian political culture, he was not surprised by the article by the “otherwise talented macroeconomist” Petrișor Peiu:

Traditionally, someone who wants to make a political career in Bucharest often suddenly becomes a Hungarian-hater, and this is especially true of the extremist AUR.”

The expert added that in the case of Călin Georgescu and his followers, he deliberately avoids the term “sovereigntist camp,” which is wrongly used in the Romanian media, because “they advocate soft fascism, they promote an ethnocratic state at the expense of minorities; they would unite the movement with the government and economic and cultural institutions in a corporatist way; they want the state to dominate the economy; they would nationalize foreign companies, they would restrict civil liberties by imposing their mystical principles.”

In the opinion of the political analyst, Peiu’s coded message is aimed at some groups in the governing coalition of National Liberals (PNL) and Social Democrats (PSD): They should blame the RMDSZ for the election scandal and co-operate with the far-right. “Like other peoples in the region, including us Hungarians, Romanians see secret conspiracies where there are none. It is our historical experience that the great powers decide over our heads, and Peiu is riding on it.

His other message is directed at the whole of Romanian society and is a full-blooded fascist legacy: the RMDSZ and the Hungarians are too powerful and should be pushed into the background,”

said Barabás.

The AUR leaders are probably not satisfied with Kelemen’s statements on Tuesday either. In an interview with the Antena 3 television channel, the RMDSZ leader said he could speak to Orbán to facilitate a meeting between Romanian government officials and representatives of the Trump administration. “I will help the Romanian Prime Minister at any time if he asks me to,” Kelemen said. Marcel Ciolacu had previously admitted that one of his two meetings with Donald Trump was mediated by Orbán.

Via maszol.ro, Featured image: MTI/Veres Nándor