Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán attends a summer university festival in Romania on July 22, 2023. (source: Benko Vivien Cher)
The Slovak Foreign Ministry summoned the Hungarian ambassador Csaba Balogh on Monday, July 24, to explain Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s ‘unacceptable and disturbing’ claims uttered during a recent summer university festival in Romania.
On July 22, which was Saturday, Orbán visited the Romanian town of Băile Tușnad to hold his annual - and often controversial - speech at the Tusványos festival, a summer event held by the Hungarian minority in Romania and attended by Orbán since the late 1990s.
At the start of his speech, critical of the West, Orbán said that Romania had asked him to avoid certain topics. He refused to follow this advice and did the opposite.
“They say that we should not talk about non-existent administrative territorial units in Romania. I wonder what they might have in mind. I think they mean Transylvania and Székelyföld [historical region in eastern Transylvania where the Hungarians live]. But we have never claimed that these are Romanian territorial units,” Orbán said, among other things, implying that they should be part of Hungary.
In response to the speech, Romania summoned Hungary’s ambassador on Monday, July 24. Slovakia was also outraged by Orbán’s remarks and quickly followed suit.
Slovak MFA Miroslav Wlachovský and his counterpart Péter Szijjártó meet in Budapest on July 3, 2023. (source: TASR)
