Civil society organisation aHang (The Voice) organized on Thursday a protest action in Brussels against Prime Minister Victor Orban and his latest public consultation on EU affairs amid noisy farmer protests disrupting traffic in the city capital with their tractors.
As previously reported, the Hungarian government launched last November a national consultation on EU-related policies. The consultation reminded the European Commission about a similar campaign in 2019. Back then, the Commission issued a point-by-point fact sheet against the government’s information manipulation. This time, the Commission decided not to comment on the consultation.
“The Hungarian government claims that it expresses the views of the majority of Hungarians via these consultations,” Gergely Hajdu, strategic director at aHang and one of its founders, told The Brussels Times. “However, Prime Minister Orban is using the consultations to influence and potentially undermine various critical issues in the EU, including its support for Ukraine.”
aHang describes itself as grassroot organisation which gives a voice to citizens in a society which is dominated by government-linked media. Founded some years ago, and funded by crowdfunding and donations, it has grown to one of the biggest advocacy civil society organisations in Hungary with 55,000 followers on Facebook and 600,000 supporters who receive its news alerts by email.
“There are different opinions in Hungary but contrary to Orban, we focus on domestic social-political problems and less on EU issues,“ Hajdu says.
The public consultation in Hungary was a kind of non-binding referendum and consisted of 11 questions. Each question started with a statement about an alleged EU policy, often formulated in a leading or inaccurate way. Citizens had two alternative responses to choose from – one to support the government’s position, the other one to disagree with it.
Question on EU support to UkraineIn question 7 in the consultation, citizens were asked to respond to the following statement: Brussels wants more money to support Ukraine. The statement is true but was followed by the following explanation: „The European Commission wants an extra €50 billion to support Ukraine. Since this amount is not available in the current EU budget, they want to squeeze extra funds from the Member States. They are asking Hungary for an additional contribution because it has not received the EU money it is contractually entitled to for a long time. Hungary has already spent billions of forints to help refugees from Ukraine.” What do you think about this? A - Let's not pay more to support Ukraine until we have received the money we are due. B - Let's accept the Brussels request even if the money we are owed is still not provided. |
Not surprisingly, almost all respondents, 99,04 % according to the authorities, chose A. The Hungarian government apparently wanted the EU to believe that all Hungarians oppose more aid to Ukraine. In fact, only 18 % or 1.5 million people of Hungary’s voting-age population participated in the consultation, a figure which was lower than in previous public consultations.
The EU has suspended EU funding to Hungary because of its concerns about the rule of law situation in the country and the independence of the judiciary. In Hungary, the government presented the results in the consultation as a victory, Hajdu says, while in Brussels Prime Minister Orban said that there was no connection between the EU support to Ukraine and the suspended EU funding.
Citizens who oppose or disagree with the government did not participate in the consultation and were not counted. To show the gap between the government’s retoric and reality, aHang brought 100,000 blank consultation forms to Brussels. All together, more than 350,000 blank forms were collected by aHang from its supporters.
aHang fills a gap in Hungary’s public debate where the goverment carries out its own surveys directed to its own base, who voted for it, and the opposition lacks resources to conduct opinion polls. On its platform, aHang publishes petitions on pressing social and economic problems. The aim is to raise awareness about the problems and influence public opinion and decision makers, especially on local level.
The issues can vary from on-off events such as the 2022 fireworks in Budapest on the national day marking the foundation of the Hungarian kingdom or current crises in the education and healthcare systems or concerns about polluting battery factories and their impact on water resources. These petitions are on-going and have until now gathered 1.5 million signatures in total.
“The issues in our petitions are distinctly different from those that Prime Minister Orban is inaccurately portraying as the primary concerns of the Hungarian people,” Gergely Hajdu, the pro-democracy activist, concluded.
The government’s public consultation ended in January, just in time before the crucial European Council summit in Brussels, where Hungary threatened to use its veto to block EU’s financial support to Ukraine.
To appease Hungary, the 26 other EU member states agreed on Thursday morning to its request for an annual review of the implementation but did not accept its demand that the review should be linked to a unanimous vote on the funding. Instead, in two years, if needed, the European Council will invite the European Commission to make a proposal for a review of next multi-annual financial framework.
M. Apelblat
The Brussels Times
