Hungary summoned its ambassador from the United States on Tuesday over what Budapest termed as “lies” from President Biden about Prime Minister Viktor Orbán supposedly seeking to become a dictator.
A diplomatic rift broke out between Budapest and Washington this week following comments from President Joe Biden, who claimed during a campaign stop in Philadelphia on Friday that Prime Minister Orbán “stated flatly he doesn’t think democracy works and is looking for dictatorship”.
Responding to the incendiary rhetoric, Hungarian Foreign Affairs Minister Péter Szijjártó said on Tuesday that the Orbán government has summoned the U.S. ambassador for an explanation for Biden’s comments.
“We are not obliged to take lies from anyone, even if that person is the President of the United States,” Minister Szijjártó said on Tuesday afternoon. “Since such a lie has been said in connection with the Hungarian prime minister, we summoned the ambassador of the United States to the ministry, who was here today.”
Szijjártó went on to say that Biden’s comments made it more difficult to build Hungarian-U.S. relations, as it was “an offence not to the government, but to the country”.
When pressed by Fox News reporter Jacqui Rogers during a White House briefing on Tuesday as to whether it was the official stance of the United States that Hungary, a NATO ally, was a dictatorship, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan refused to confirm whether or not the president’s comments reflect the government’s official stance, referring the question to the Biden re-election campaign.
“Our position is that Hungary has engaged in an assault on Democratic institutions and that remains a source of grave concern to us,” Sullivan said
The accusations from President Biden came after the Hungarian Prime Minister — who was democratically elected in 2014, 2018, and 2022 after serving years in opposition after his first stint as leader between 1998 and 2002 — once again expressed his belief that only Donald Trump can bring peace back to Europe, while chastising Biden as a “pro-war” president.
Following a meeting with Trump at his estate at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on Friday, Orbán said that he believed the presumptive Republican nominee would bring the war in Ukraine to an end by cutting off military aid to Kyiv and thereby forcing the Zelensky government into coming to the negotiating table with Moscow.
The Hungarian Prime Minister said that his country wants “nothing more than peace, a ceasefire as soon as possible, the end of this war that is slowly stretching into infinity as soon as possible. I don’t see any other person as determined and strong as Donald Trump.”
Orbán’s conservative government has long been a thorn in the side of globalists in the European Union and Democrat administrations in the United States such as Biden’s White House, which has been reported to be working alongside leftist NGOs to funnel money into “opposition media” in Hungary in an apparent attempt to weaken and ultimately remove the populist prime minister from office.
Meanwhile, the European Union, which was initially established as merely an economic bloc, has sought to impose financial penalties on Budapest through withholding joint EU funds over so-called “rule of law” violations in response to Hungary passing legislation restricting LGBT ideology in schools and for protecting its borders from illegal migration. Orbán further riled Brussels by opposing further military aid to Ukraine, arguing that a peace settlement would be better for his country as well as for the rest of Europe.