Steven N.
Whenever there’s an election, Easter, or Christmas, one consistent element in newspapers run by the Mediaworks holding company is the “cloned” Orbán interview, writes HVG.
Although county newspapers ostensibly cover local issues, the politics section is edited from Mediaworks’ headquarters on Bécsi Road in Budapest, and the interview with the Prime Minister is a mandatory feature at Easter, Christmas, and elections.
Although normally such interviews are conducted by the “Mediaworks News Center,” this Christmas the interviewer was a certain Péter Csermely, who HVG suggests lobbed softball questions to the Prime Minister and offered biased comments during the interview. Likewise, Orbán gives the same type of pat answers that he does with Katalin Nagy in his usual Friday morning interviews on Kossuth Rádió.
According to Orbán, Hungary has remained a prosperous democracy, saying that:
There is no other country in the EU where the opinions of millions of citizens are taken into account to the same extent as in Hungary when making basic governmental decisions.
Index points out that the Prime Minister also claimed that Germany was more corrupt than Hungary:
Brussels, although it makes a lot of noise about it, cannot seriously think for a moment that Hungary is corrupt. It is enough just to look at the persons in the new German government and see that Hungary does much bettter on the corruption ranking.
The prime minister anticipates that the government will face three challenges in 2022: “The first is to implement these major economic measures, the second is to continue successfully protecting against the virus, and the third is to hold the child protection referendum.”
