Fidesz has been known for its doggedness when it comes to keeping alive a subject the party deems important. It matters not how petty and immaterial the issue looks to us, those who got the job of going after the victim will move heaven and earth to achieve their goal.
In the past two weeks I have been watching with growing fascination how the Fidesz big-game hunters are pursuing their victim Márta Demeter, the newly elected co-chair of LMP, who in the last four years has been a real irritant as far as the Orbán government and Fidesz are concerned. She has the “annoying” habit of asking uncomfortable questions, especially when it comes to national security matters. Although her party is becoming less and less of a factor in Hungarian politics, her incessant probing into Viktor Orbán’s close relationships with foreigners from the Middle East who either failed to get Hungarian national security clearance or were pursued by the FBI and Interpol must have exasperated the Hungarian prime minister. Finally, Márta Demeter gave the powers-that-be an opportunity to move against her.
Márta Demeter’s targets were the two new airplanes allegedly purchased as military transport planes but most often used to transport members of the government. Demeter eventually received permission to take a look at the documents pertaining to the flight schedule of these planes and found that, at the beginning of September, Flóra Orbán received permission from the high command to be on a flight between Paphos, Cyprus, and Budapest. The youngest daughter of Viktor Orbán is 14 years old and her name is Flóra. Demeter asked Interior Minister Sándor Pintér whether or not he considered the use of a military plane for such a purpose appropriate.
In no time all the independent media outlets carried the news of the prime minister’s daughter’s use of a military plane. To make a long story short, the Flóra Orbán on that plane turned out to be the two-year-old daughter of an army officer. That piece of information was not released by the government directly. Instead, they made use of the government propaganda outlet Origo. Demeter was accused of deliberate lying because “by receiving permission to view the documents she must have known that the airplane transported only military personnel and their family members.” At the same time, the government threatened any and all media outlets that made any reference to the “fake news” concerning the prime minister’s daughter with law suits.
Soon enough the whole Fidesz heavy artillery was at work. Máté Kocsis, leader of the Fidesz parliamentary delegation, was the first party functionary to announce a response to this deliberate lie. They will file a complaint because Demeter knowingly made military secrets public. After Kocsis, Lajos Kósa moved into action. He demanded a review of Demeter’s national security clearance and asked László Kövér to initiate the necessary proceedings. According to Kósa, Demeter made public military intelligence that was supposed to remain secret for 30 years. He threatened to take away her position as deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee on the armed forces and the police. At one point he intimated that she might lose her parliamentary mandate.
Márta Demeter in action
Let’s take a deep breath and look at this unfortunate affair objectively. One thing is sure, Márta Demeter didn’t handle the information she received carefully enough. She jumped to the conclusion that the Flóra Orbán on the plane had to be the daughter of the prime minister. How could that have happened? Unfortunately, Márta Demeter hasn’t disclosed the exact nature of the source or sources she relied on. Did she have the opportunity to see the complete list of passengers or not? Because if she did and the government’s story is correct, there had to be three Orbáns on that list: the father, the mother, and the two-year-old child. In that case, Demeter had to be truly sloppy. But if she was allowed to see only a partial list on which only Flóra Orbán’s name appeared, her mistake was understandable. Szilárd Németh, undersecretary of the ministry of defense, while trying to prove Demeter’s guilt, showed the official letter of the military officer who granted permission for Captain Orbán to have his wife and daughter with him on the plane. It is unlikely that Demeter had the opportunity to see all the information that was necessary to come to a correct assessment of the situation. In that case, I’m afraid Demeter was duped.
Regrettably, we have no answers to these questions at the moment, but Márta Demeter is correct in her firm insistence that if anyone divulged military secrets, it was Szilárd Németh, who gave all the details of the military transport from Cyprus to Hungary, including the names of the members of the Orbán family. Demeter merely asked a question that could have been answered very simply without disclosing secrets worth 30 years of silence: “No, the Flóra Orbán on the plane was not the prime minister’s daughter but a namesake.” But then, Márta Demeter couldn’t today be accused of leaking military secrets to the great rejoicing of the Fidesz members of parliament, including the prime minister, who found Demeter’s repeated demands for his own national security clearance exasperating.
By now this “Demeter affair” has gotten out of hand. The once highly respected Zsolt Németh, second in charge of the ministry of foreign affairs but by now only chairman of the foreign relations committee, sank as low as calling Demeter stupid. Of course, it wasn’t done in a straightforward manner but in a roundabout and dishonest way. Magyar Narancs, pondering the same questions I did earlier in this post, wrote that “there can be only two possibilities. Márta Demeter saw all these documents and she was invidiously slipshod or invidiously irresponsible. In addition, she showed herself to be mentally deficient. But the question is: could Márta Demeter be that stupid? The other answer–which only Márta Demeter can clear up–is that she didn’t see the permission of the military officer from which Flóra’s family connection would have been clear. What she could have seen is the official passenger list which has only a name (plus a passport number), and that this Flóra is that Flóra someone must have whispered into her ear, someone who was an extraordinarily trustworthy source. In that case Demeter was badly conned.” The message was that no, she couldn’t have been that stupid, that instead she was conned. Zsolt Németh, however, used Magyar Narancs’s doubting sentence to state that, in his opinion, Márta Demeter is that stupid. This is an ignoble episode in Zsolt Németh’s political career, which even László Kövér, who happened to be presiding, disapproved of.
After three national security clearances in five years Márta Demeter will have to go through another one. It will take a month. The result might determine this young, very active woman’s political future. Everything will depend on how much Viktor Orbán wants Márta Demeter out of the way.