Icon: enlarge
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is turning his back on the European People's Party with his Fidesz
Photo: STEPHANIE LECOCQ / EPA
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling party Fidesz have broken completely with the Christian Democratic European People's Party (EPP).
This emerges from a letter from Fidesz to the EPP, the receipt of which the EPP confirmed to the dpa news agency.
At the beginning of the month, the Fidesz MPs had already left the EPP Group in the European Parliament.
The fact that Orbán's party would break with the EPP as a party has been a matter of form since leaving the parliamentary group.
The letter had been sent by Fidesz's international secretariat.
Fidesz no longer wanted to maintain membership in the EPP and was therefore terminating it, it said.
Fidesz Vice-Chair Katalin Novák commented on a photo of the letter on Twitter with the words: "It's time to say goodbye."
The termination of Fidesz membership in the EPP and its parliamentary group followed years of dispute in the party family, which also includes the CDU and CSU.
At party level, Fidesz's membership in the EPP had been suspended since 2019.
At that time, suspected violations by Hungary of EU fundamental values as well as verbal attacks by Fidesz politicians against the then EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker were decisive for the move.
The right-wing national Orbán has been criticized for its actions in Hungary.
Among other things, it is about its refugee, media, university and judicial policy.
Among other things, legal proceedings under Article 7 of the EU treaties are ongoing against Hungary.
Most recently, an expert from the European Court of Justice stated that the so-called Stop Soros Law was not in line with EU law.
The Hungarian law criminalizes NGO workers and activists who want to give asylum seekers access to a procedure, even if they were not persecuted in their country of origin or in a country on their way to Hungary.
The term »Stop Soros« refers to the liberal US billionaire and Holocaust survivor George Soros, who has already been attacked by Orbán several times.
Icon: The mirror
fek / dpa / AFP