Funding was given to an organization that is not subject to strict party funding laws.Continue reading
Hungary’s sovereignty could be seriously damaged by the fact that the opposition could have received substantial funding from the United States before and after the elections, Magyar Nemzet writes. The parliament’s national security committee is also investigating.
The parliament’s national security committee will in the coming weeks “continuously investigate” the facts emerging from the services’ analytical and evaluation work on US campaign financing of the joint opposition’s election campaign, Magyar Nemzet reports.
“The unlawful foreign interference attempt has sparked great debate among the members of the committee, as the unprecedented case seriously violates Hungary’s sovereignty,” the paper learned from the closed session.
Magyar Nemzet recalled that Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition’s former candidate for prime minister, recently admitted that in June, months after the elections, his Everybody’s Hungary Movement (MMM) received hundreds of millions of forints in support from the United States.
The politician said they had received a total of around 1.86 billion forints from a US foundation called Action for Democracy, led by well-known critics of the Hungarian and other conservative governments. Márki-Zay argued that although foreign funding of political parties is prohibited by law, MMM is a movement, not a party.
Máté Kocsis, the leader of the governing Fidesz’s parliamentary group, last month called on parliament’s national security committee to review the opposition’s foreign funding. He said that in the past 30 years there had been no example of what Péter Márki-Zay had done “carelessly or deliberately”, and that he had admitted in full public view that his campaign had received billions of forints in foreign funding.
According to a fresh poll by the Századvég Foundation, 71 percent of Hungarians heard the news about MMM’s foreign funding case. 62 percent of people said that it is uneccaptable for Hungarian parties or politicians to directly or indirectly accept significant campaign funding from foreign economic or political entities.
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