Hungary's Veto On Sweden Does Erdoğan A Favour
Orbán's critics in Stockholm don't give up the fight.
A young economist working in a Swedish university sits down beside me at the table.
“There have been three waves of Hungarian emigration. One in the early 1900’s, one in 1956 and one now”, the economist says.
A part of the country’s diaspora is gathering at this central Stockholm bar on a crowded Friday night. With them is Márton Tompos, a 34-year old member of the Hungarian parliament.
Tompos is a spokesperson of Momentum, a centrist political party formed after a successful campaign to stop the Budapest bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. The party is a member of the liberal Renew Europe group in the European Parliament, even as Tompos claims that the party “believes in a strong social welfare state”.
He is in Sweden to meet up with one of the party’s international hubs.
- We have chapters all over Europe. We want to motivate them and listen to their problems, Tompos says to me with an American accent to his English.
According to Tompos, many of Momentum’s international followers are highly educated and more liberal people who do their Erasmus. Among the refugees from 1956, many support the country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.
Tompos was elected into parliament in an election he himself describes as a “disaster”. Last year’s failed attempt to unseat Orbán made many Hungarians give up on politics.
The MP himself doesn’t think it makes any sense to spend too much time on the parliamentary process. As the governing party Fidesz doesn’t listen, he chooses to meet people and do open forums instead.
Hungary has made it to the headlines lately, after the country joined Turkey in blocking Sweden’s entry to NATO. A spokesperson for Orbán recently wrote that Sweden sits on a “crumbling throne of moral superiority” in its criticism against Hungary’s democratic credentials.
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