Bloomberg article ‘paints skewed picture’ of Hungary, says Orbán cabinet

In a letter addressed to the editor of the website of Bloomberg news agency in response to a recent article on the Hungarian government’s policies, government spokesman Zoltán Kovács said the article painted a “skewed picture of today’s Hungary”.

In its June 1 article, Bloomberg described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a key figure of a rise of populists threatening to divide the European Union. It cited Orban’s critics as saying that his rhetoric was “contrary to the values the EU has been built upon”. The article also said the Hungarian government had “widened a crackdown against non-governmental organisations and moved to silence dissent by undercutting the media and the judiciary”. It said political pressure has led US financier George Soros‘s Open Society Foundations (OSF) to move from Budapest to Berlin.

Kovács said

the article listed “the usual litany of charges” and distorted the meaning of what is happening in parts of Europe that oppose mass migration.

The government spokesman called the OSF “a fund for ideologically driven political activism”. “Under the so-called ‘crackdown,’ the Soros-funded Open Society network has come under stricter regulations affecting groups that survive almost exclusively on foreign funding to carry out activities that are blatantly partisan and drive an agenda that seeks to influence political outcomes,” Kovács said. “These groups have no democratic mandate but represent instead the very ideological interests of their foreign funder.”