Liberal pundit justifies US funding for opposition
July 8th, 2023A well-known liberal commentator thinks opposition parties couldn’t finance their electoral campaigns without help from abroad.
Opposition top candidate Péter Márki-Zay’s movement called Everybody’s Hungary received funding from a US-based foundation, ahead of the 2022 election (see BudaPost, September 29, 2022). Under Hungarian law, political parties are banned from receiving foreign financial support, but Márki-Zay argued that his movement was not a party. Last month, Parliament declassified a report by Hungary’s national security services on ‘foreign interference’ in Hungarian elections, including that particular episode (see BudaPost, June 29, 2023).
On hvg.hu, Sándor Révész admits that the way the opposition campaign was financed in the runup for last year’s general election is open to criticism, but he adds that morally speaking, it was fully justified. He describes the regime in place in Hungary as one that deprives the people of its sovereignty and therefore foreign support for the opposition serves a noble cause. Very few countries in the world actually became or remained democracies without (or against) foreign influence, Révész writes. He therefore welcomes ‘rolling Dollars and Euros’, because he believes Hungary’s future depends on ‘vital foreign resources’.
Tags: Márki-Zay, Rolling Dollars