US Ambassador David Pressman is being true to his own self: in a recent interview he accused the Hungarian government of lying, stating that during the campaign before the European Parliament elections, government politicians falsely claimed that NATO would drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine.
The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade summoned Ambassador David Pressman on Tuesday in response to US President Joe Biden’s statement, in which he had implicitly referred to Viktor Orbán as a dictator.
Renowned Hungarian political analysts concurred on a recent talk show that US Ambassador David Pressman is a political activist rather than a diplomat.
US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman was quick to condemn PM Viktor Orbán’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing on the social media platform X., suggesting the Hungarian prime minister was ‘pleading for business deals’. In response, Balázs Orbán pointed out that the US has in fact doubled its import of enriched uranium from Russia since the start of the war.
This is not the first instance of the ambassador offering an unsolicited opinion about Hungary’s past. Last year, he published a message regarding the 1956 revolution, drawing parallels with the Russo-Ukrainian war, and this spring he lauded the Soviet Red Army that occupied Hungary in 1945.
It can’t be doubted that gays and lesbians have been badly treated. It is real and welcome progress that gay men and women can walk the streets of Budapest holding hands and face no harm. In a liberal society, people have a right to be wrong. But that right is not unlimited…Only a few years ago, if one had said, ‘They’re coming for our children!’, one would have been denounced as a bigot and an alarmist. Now, in 2023, a gay rights march chants the same thing, proudly, in America’s cultural capital.
The US Ambassador announced that three senior officials of IIB, including a Hungarian citizen, Imre Laszlóczki, and two Russian nationals, Nikolai Kosov and Georgi Potapov have been placed on the list of sanctioned individuals. IIB is a platform for Russia to extend its influence in the region, and is therefore a potential threat for both the European Union and its Western allies, Pressman stated.
It was high time the practice of ‘taking Hungarians for an idiot’ stopped, and the country that has a one-thousand-year-old Christian statehood is given the respect it deserves.
‘It is time for the United States to return to diplomacy grounded in respect, dialogue and truth, particularly in our relationship with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government,’ Mr Leib proclaims in his recently published opinion piece about the current state of US–Hungary relations for The Washington Times.
This is not the first time the American Embassy engages in such odd conduct. Its anti-government billboard campaign in April 2023 was similarly negative, short-lived and ineffective.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.