House Speaker: Interests of the ethnic Hungarian community are a priority in Romania
During an interview with Mandiner, Kövér said the decision on who the right presidential candidate for ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania was should be decided by them and specifically their political representatives, namely the ethnic Hungarian RMDSZ party.
'We fully respect and support this decision; this is always how it has been, so this is nothing new,' the speaker said.
Kövér said Hungary and its government did not want to weigh in on the election of any country and did not support any presidential candidates.
This vote, he said, was the internal affair of Romania's electorate. He noted that there was already a precedent for European Union institutions questioning the internal democratic decision of a member state, citing as an example the attempt in the early 2000s to isolate Austria's OVP-FPO coalition led by Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel.
'In politics, it's patience, perseverance and wisdom that get us the result we all hope for,' Kövér said.
'We, as a non-EU country, stood up for people's right to make their own decisions even back then,' he said. 'Because we don't believe that the EU was created to interfere in the internal affairs of any country, especially not as grossly as it has been doing more recently, or to try to discipline voters either verbally or through different kinds of sanctions.'
Kövér said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's remarks had been about Hungary's willingness to cooperate with a country's governing parties regarding bilateral ties, the given country's minority communities and regarding EU affairs.
He said the most important consideration was respecting the rights, dignity and interests of the country's ethnic Hungarian communities.
Meanwhile, Kövér said it was 'unprecedented' how far the AUR party's leader had gone with his earlier 'anti-Hungarian gestures and remarks' as well as certain actions he had organised, adding that the government fully understood and shared the concerns that had arisen from this.
'At the same time, we enter into potential cooperation with every potential partner with the hope that if these problems can't be put aside or eliminated, we can at least initiate processes through which these problems are made less significant,' Kövér said.
He cited the positive example of how Slovakia, under its Prime Minister Robert Fico was the closest to Hungary in the EU on almost all issues today, despite the 'serious incidents' with Slovakia's Hungarian community that had happened during Fico's previous premiership.
'We can count on their support and they can count on ours, and though the situation of Slovakia's ethnic Hungarian community isn't what it could be, the government has shown a significant, positive change in its approach to the problems of the Hungarian community,' the speaker said, adding that the situation was perhaps even more striking in the case of Serbia.
Kövér said after the assaults against Serbia's ethnic Hungarians in the 1990s and early 2000s, the local Hungarian community was now 'in the best legal and political situation' under the governance of a party that was labelled nationalist.
Asked to comment on Tisza Party leader Peter Magyar's accusation that Orbán had 'betrayed' the ethnic Hungarian communities beyond the borders, Kövér said: 'What else could we have expected from this gang other than … an attack at the first possible sensitive moment against the national cooperation that also exists with Hungarians across the border?'
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