Steven N.
The leaders of the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) expressed their concerns to Donald Tusk, the president of the European People’s Party (EPP), in a letter regarding Tusk’s recent meeting with Hungarian prime ministerial candidate Péter Márki-Zay in Warsaw on Thursday. The letter was written by Zsolt Semjén and György Hölvényi (pictured), the sole Hungarian MEP remaining in the EPP, the largest party group in the European Parliament.
As previously reported, Donald Tusk and Péter Márki-Zay held a joint press conference after their meeting, where Tusk said that the European People’s Party welcomed the Hungarian opposition leader, and agreed that the Polish and Hungarian opposition were in very similar situations, facing similar opponents, and would have to stick together.
In the letter addressed to Tusk, the KDNP leaders stated that the Hungarian left-wing opposition is a political opponent of the KDNP, an EPP member party, and that this opposition and its candidate continuously insult their party, which is one of the EPP’s oldest members from the Central and Eastern European region.
Semjén and Hölvényi’s letter also pointed out that Donald Tusk was negotiating with a man who did not have his own party, and was only a candidate of a political platform. Jobbik, the letter reminded Tusk, is another member of that platform, a party which had until recently been part of the anti-Semitic far right.
They were also aggrieved that the president of the EPP, a group that brings together more than 80 member and partner organizations, held a meeting with Márki-Zay without consulting with the group’s membership beforehand.
The letter admitted, however, that Donald Tusk could meet with anyone he saw fit. However, the statements of the President of the EPP in the joint press conference, suggesting that the European People’s Party intends to work together with the left-wing Hungarian opposition, are completely contrary to the rules and traditions of the European People’s Party, according to the authors of the letter.
The KDNP has been a member of the EPP for decades, but they say no similar thing as this has ever happened in the group until now, and they expressed hope that it would not happen again.
[Telex]
