Kocsis: Foreign financiers trying to install pro-war left-wing government

He said it had become clear in 2022 that the Hungarian left wing was being financed from abroad.

“I don’t think this has stopped: left-wing pro-war rhetoric is still evident today just as it is in western Europe,” he added.

The war in Ukraine, he said, was the focus of political discourse, with Hungary on the side of peace and western Europe in favour of war.

But it appeared, Kocsis added, that several European parties were on course to secure enough seats in the European Parliament elections to form a new political unit with “Europe’s interests” at heart.

War, he said, was not in Europe’s interest. “The Americans may have an interest, the Russians may have an interest … but now it is broadly felt that [war] is not a European interest,” he added.

Referring to “another Peter [Magyar]”, he said “a new messiah” had already turned up in 2022 “when he was called Peter Marki-Zay … the recipe is the same”.

He said foreign financiers’ goals had not changed: to overthrow or weaken the current anti-war Hungarian government. Referring to an official investigation into foreign financing under the Sovereignty Protection Act, he said “foreign financiers will do everything” to bypass the rules.

“These methods [to bypass rules] are bottomless; you can’t protect against everything,” he said, adding that former Socialist prime minister Gordon Bajnai and Adam Ficsor, a former intelligence services minister, had “reappeared”, and now their methods once used to support the left wing were being used “elsewhere”.