The programme of an upcoming visit by the European Parliament’s committee for culture and education (CULT) to Hungary has “turned out to be one-sided”, Tamás Deutsch, MEP of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, said on Wednesday and suggested that the committee had dismissed his party’s recommendations.
Fidesz MEP Andrea Bocskor and others had “recommended a number of institutions and people” for the committee to contact while in Hungary but they “neglected the most fundamental expectations of impartiality and variety”, Deutsch insisted in a letter to Sabine Verheyen, the head of the committee. Deutsch said the programme was imbalanced, giving a disproportionately large focus to “opposition, leftist or liberal politicians, activists, institutions, journalists and civil organisations critical of the government”. While the programme includes meetings with “some two dozen militant anti-government” figures, the delegation will “meet only a few government players”, he said. “The way the programme was made reinforces the suspicion that its one-sided character had not been caused by a lack of prudence but by a deliberate political intent,” Deutsch said.