Viktor Orbán’s Berlin Panel Talk Interesting and Useful, Journalist Says

The podium discussion in Berlin last week, attended by Viktor Orbán, has helped to make the Hungarian position better understood in Germany, according to one of the journalists who took part.

Tomasz Kurianowicz, a journalist from the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, told Hungarian public Kossuth Radio that the panel discussion with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Berlin last week was interesting and informative. He added that although he had heard about the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, he had not thought about their situation before.

Kurianowicz said that many in the room were surprised when Orbán said that if Angela Merkel were German Chancellor today, the war would not have broken out. Orbán’s remark that peace could only be imagined with another US president, Donald Trump, also got the audience thinking.

According to Kurianowicz, it was predictable that the panel discussion in the conservative journal Cicero and the daily Berliner Zeitung would attract a lot of criticism, because in Germany Orbán is a divisive figure. But they want their readers to see the problems from different perspectives, he said.

“Viktor Orbán is the prime minister of a European Union country, the prime minister of an important country,” the Berliner Zeitung journalist stressed.

He recalled that some complained that they had conducted a panel discussion rather than a confrontational interview with the Prime Minister. Others were upset by the fact that Orbán was given a platform at all. Kurianowicz emphasized that the journalists could ask questions freely, “there were no taboos.”

The journalist stressed that there are different reactions to the war in Ukraine in the world and that the Western European countries’ opinion is in the minority. This is why he believes it is important to listen to other opinions in order to get a more complete picture.

Featured photo via Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda/Fischer Zoltán