House Speaker: The entire nation is behind Transcarpathian Hungarians

Ukrainian politicians must know that the entire Hungarian nation is behind the Transcarpathian Hungarian community, and the Hungarian state will not give up protecting their interests despite any pressure, Speaker of Parliament László Kövér said in Budapest on Friday.

In his opening address to the Forum of Hungarian Lawmakers from the Carpathian Basin (KMKF), Kövér said there was no separate cause for Hungarians living beyond the borders and those within, only a unified Hungarian nation and a unified Hungarian cause, MTI reported.

Kövér emphasised that the matter of the Transcarpathian Hungarians was not merely a minority issue, but an existential issue in the strictest sense of the word, just as that of the native minority communities, which make up more than a tenth of the European population, was not only a moral issue, but one of realpolitik. What is happening today to European national minorities can happen tomorrow to the majority nations as well, Kövér said.

He also pointed out that after the conclusion of the war in Ukraine, it would not be possible to rebuild the European security policy architecture without a fair settlement of the issue of national rights. In the absence of this, any new European security concept is only built on sand, he said.

Kövér argued that the war in Ukraine did not begin with the first Russian gunshot in February last year, but when leading Russian politicians questioned the independence of the Ukrainian nation, the existence of an independent Ukrainian language and culture, openly expressing the idea that what claims to be Ukraine must be Russified. At the same time, the speaker posed the question of what happens if the victim also questions the ethnic reality of others and tries to restrict and eliminate it.

He said the Ukrainian state had been acting restrictively towards its ethnic minorities since 2015, long before the war began. It started disputing their rights to their identity, their mother tongue and culture, and effectively started to try to Ukrainise them.

What is happening in Ukraine today, Kövér said, proved that the policy of ethnic dominance does not make a state stronger or more stable, but rather more vulnerable.

The position of Hungary’s policy for national communities is that ensuring a European-level, principled and democratic solution to the national problems in Europe — especially for the integration process of the Balkan states — is not only a measure of taking human rights seriously but also a vital security policy interest, Kövér said. Violations against national identity sooner or later result in political destabilisation, while the principled and legal protection of national identity strengthens political stability and security, he emphasised.