"Hungary has forfeited the right to vote"

(ADW) For Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, the current policies of Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are a thorn in his side. In an interview in the current edition of German magazine Spiegel, Asselborn did not mince his words. He believes that Orbán's government undermines the fundamental values of democratic law.

In Hungary the freedom of expression is to be abolished, tighter controls of the media are to take place and judges loyal to the regime may be used. It draws a comparison, states the Foreign Minister, to the dictatorship system in Belarus. At the same time he accused the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, of keeping a “protective hand” over Orbán.

Asselborn believes that the three EU Commission rulings against Hungary for violating EU treaties did not go far enough. All 500 million citizens have equal rights to live "in dignity, freedom and a democracy."

He made it perfectly clear that if the situation does not change, Hungary should withdraw from the EU because of its serious breaches regarding fundamental values of freedom, saying that it had "forfeited the right to vote."