German MEP Daniel Freund is not a fan of Viktor Orbán—and he likes to show that, mostly on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). In fact, he was listed among the most Hungarophobic politicians of Europe, in the article we published on our site earlier this month.
MEP Freund just could not contain himself. Yet again, he felt the urge to go to X to publicly disparage the Prime Minister of Hungary. This time, it was Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa caucus that prompted him to do so. He wrote: ‘While we’re all looking to Iowa in disbelief about the Trump win in the primaries, keep in mind that the EU-Commission just unfroze 10bn Euros for this guy’, along with a picture of PM Orbán.
First off, Freund and his fellow liberals around the world had plenty of time to prepare for the shock and ‘disbelief’ of Trump’s win in Iowa, as he had been leading the polls by a massive margin for months leading up to the caucus. Second, while there is an obvious connection between Trump and Orbán, with the two statesmen exchanging praise on multiple occasions in the past, as far as the partially unfrozen EU funds due to Hungary go, the former POTUS had nothing to do with that.
It is quite a stretch to shoehorn a ‘diss’ of Orbán in that context. As such, the tweet did not garner much attention on X, receiving 257 likes and 118 comments in the less than a day it has been posted.
Out of those 118 comments, many show discontent with MEP Freund’s take. For example, one Polish account wrote: ‘You don't like democracy? Imagine our shock!’. Meanwhile, a Hungarian account commented: ‘It's good if you cry,’ along with a picture of Donald Trump in front of a map showing him sweeping all 99 counties in Iowa. However, that image is slightly inaccurate, given President Trump won ‘only’ 98 out of the 99 counties in the state, with Nikki Haley eventually taking Johnson County—by a single vote…
The withholding of EU funds from Hungary has been quite an obsession of the Green MEP for a long time.
So much so that he has called the freezing of a €6.7 billion EU payment to Hungary one of the highlights of his career—no wonder he was quite perturbed when he heard the EU Commission had approved the release of €10.2 billion of EU cohesion funds to the Orbán administration in December 2023.
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