Evaluation report on the EU referendum held in Hungary on April 12th 2003.

This report was drawn up on the request of TEAM, The European Alliance of EU-critical Movements, for the European Referendum Monitoring (ERM) Conference, held in Svaty Jur, Slovakia on 20-21 June 2003.

Part I of the report (Congruence of facts and criteria) follows the list of ten criteria for fair referendums, compiled by TEAM.

Part II (Further aspects and injurious practices) shows some special features of the Hungarian EU-referendum and some events illustrating the atmosphere of the whole procedure, as well as the way it was handled by the political forces in power and in opposition. According to the author’s opinion they might be worth to consider as a possible source for addendums to the present list of criteria

Part III (Summary) embodies the conclusions.

Part I – Congruence of facts and criteria

1. Is the question fair?

The referendum was held on the decision of the Hungarian Parliament. The way they selected to get it through was by amending the Law (XX of 1949), which is called “The Hungarian Constitution”. The sad side of the story is that the law concerned was enforced by the first communist government of the country and generally is referred to as the “Stalinist Constitution”, as it was drafted in Moscow. Although it was modified a bit, serious legal experts doubt its validity. Not to mention that its spirit is completely alien to the traditional Hungarian constitutional thinking, which is a result of a 1100-year-long organic development.

The new amendment (§ 79) of the law, unofficially translated, sounds as follows: “A peremptory referendum has to be held on the Hungarian Republic’s joining to the European Union under the conditions set down in the Treaty of Joining. […] The question to put is: Are you in favour that the Hungarian Republic becomes a member of the European Union?”

It can be seen that this is an example of an unfair question as mentioned in TEAM’s criteria. Moreover it is a dirty misuse of the sincere wish of the people to belong to the European community after the long years we had to spend in the “peace camp”.

So our answer to Question 1 is NO, the question was not fair, but misleading.

2. Is there enough time for a full national debate?

The question is hard to interpret since there was no national debate at all. The time span between the referendum and the announcement of its date (23 December 2002 - 12 April 2003, that is, three months) is half of what the Copenhagen Declaration required, considering the exceptional importance and long lasting effects of the decision.

But even this short period was completely of no use since the officially “non-official” version of the full Hungarian text of the 5 thousand-page Treaty appeared on the home page of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs only 3 to 5 days before the referendum. Moreover it was not readable, as it was full of references to different EU treaties and EU laws. If one considers the realistic requirement of the Copenhagen Declaration, that at least a half-year long public debate is desirable over the Treaty, one cannot establish anything but that the referendum in Hungary was a real mockery.

So our answer to Question 2 is No.

3. Is maximum public participation encouraged?

It is a question of interpretation. Formally yes, moreover very aggressively. But, as the final participation showed, it was a complete failure. No official investigation was made to find out the reasons for the aloofness of the people in such a historic event.

We believe that we are not far from truth if we risk the following statement: the one-sided, countrywide, round-the-clock, aggressive, all-media campaign, associated with the memories of the anomalies of the previous parliamentary election, followed by brutal police attacks on peaceful demonstrators, the recollection of the so-called “free elections” of the communist days and the present police atrocities against people trying to compensate the one-sided propaganda, have all developed a climate which made masses of people believe that it would be completely useless to vote as their votes would not count for anything. They were convinced that, like in the old days, the outcome would be independent of the actual voting: “it was agreed long ago,” they said. Members of our Movement have been talking with dozens of not highly educated people, various skilled and unskilled workers expressing this opinion and declaring that they did not intend to vote. More and more people believe that the present democracy is not any better than the “people’s democracy” of the Bolshevik times. (It is worth to consider a remark of Noam Chomski: “It is always said that socialism has failed. Why is it not said that democracy has failed, after all these countries called themselves people’s democracies?” We think that both have failed.)

Considering the above, our answer to Question 3 is No, responsible participation was not encouraged at all.

4. Is there equality between both sides as regards the use of public resources?

The government established the so-called EU Communication Public Foundation with the task of preparing the people for the referendum. The Movement for a Free Hungary sent a letter to the Head of the Foundation, who replied that he could not interpret the expression “sides”. He described their task as “to make people’s feelings resonant with the referendum”. His advice to the Movement was to make use of just the Internet on its own, adding that this way the orientation of the people will be more “multi-coloured”. He did not go as far as proposing the use of paper and pen, or delivering information to the people on the wings of winds, or by sonic waves.

When the Movement regularly applied for financial support, it was refused without any explanation. Yet, the “Association for Nature Conservation and Bird Protection” was supported as they promised to make some propaganda for the “Yes” side, and so was the case with the “Association for Mental Illness”. This is not joke, but fact. We are not against such important and humanitarian organizations being supported, but not for their participation in supporting pro-EU propaganda.

The Foundation disposed of about 8 million €. But all the ministries, municipalities had their own budget. There were estimates in newspapers stating that the expenses summed up to 30-40 million €. There were some hidden expenses, too. For example, the army constructed a boat-bridge across the Danube in Budapest, called “Bridge to Europe”, embellished with EU decorations. It was said to have cost nothing as it was constructed in the frame of a regular war-game. It was only a fortunate coincidence that the construction drill happened to be in Budapest and just before the referendum. So the expenses were covered by the army budget.

All this money was spent on EU propaganda. Not a single penny was given to the other side, to the opponents of the Treaty.

So our answer to Question 4 is No.

5. Is there equality in the broadcast media?

Only the pro-EU views were given air time on TV and radio programs, with the exception of four opportunities on one particular programme. And even in this single case, the real intention was not to stimulate a fair debate but to ridicule the opposition.

It was an early afternoon programme, a kind of “talk show”, broadcast by a national channel of countrywide coverage. The editor of the programme is notorious for creating scandals of everything he deals with. He, probably misled by the general state propaganda that only uneducated people are against EU membership, invited the experts of the Movement for a Free Hungary on his own initiative and tried to make fun of them. After being unsuccessful in his efforts, he refused participation to the financial expert of the team, a certain Mr. János Drábik, American and Hungarian citizen and lawyer, retired chief editor of Free Europe Radio, Munich, author of a two-volume book on the influence and history of globalisation. So this put to an end the single opportunity of the opposition to explain their views on TV.

Another scandalous case was when a commercial channel refused the broadcasting of a paid advertisement from the Green Party of Hungary, also against EU membership. We think it is a clear case of censorship.”

So our answer to Question 5 is No.

6. Is there a ceiling on referendum spending by private interests?

Nobody accredited importance to this possibility. This type of resource would have been significant for the opposition side, but entrepreneurs dared not take the risk to donate. They were afraid of being boycotted and insulted by authorities if it became public. There was only one entrepreneur, who donated 780 €, while a private person, a returned Hungarian migrant, covered the printing expenses of a quantity of leaflets, the cost of which was about 1900 €.

The only other resource of the Movement for a Free Hungary were small donations from people in the street. The whole budget of the Movement’s EU-membership opposition was about 15 thousand €. The Hungarian Chamber of Commerce spent 200 thousand € on pro-EU propaganda from its own budget without the authorisation of its membership.

Although the magnitude of private spending was negligible compared to the state budget, more than ten times as much was spent on EU-supporting propaganda, than on the opposing one.

So the answer to Question 6 is No.

7. Is foreign funding excluded where there is fair domestic funding?

The idea did not come across anyone’s mind. It was not an issue. If it was, it remained a secret, and it was spent on the ‘Yes’ side. But there was no real need for foreign funding.

So the answer to Question 7 is No, as there was no exclusion, but there was no known spending either.

8. Do outside bodies, like the EU Commission and European Parliament, and foreign governments, avoid interference in national referendums?

When it became clear that the government would not spend a single copper to inform people about the aspects of the opposing side, the Movement for a Free Hungary sent a letter to Mr. Thomas Glaser, Head of the Information Section of the EC Delegation in Budapest, informing him about the unlawful partiality of the Hungarian bodies. The answer was a polite refusal referring to the circumstance that they had no right to “interfere in Hungary’s internal political affairs”.

Some years ago Western politicians were not so diffident in cases of human rights violations. In fact, they were very loud in their criticisms since they regarded their interference in internal affairs of other countries as a mission in the name of humanity. So it seems that there are wrong violations of human rights, and good ones, depending on who is the interested party. And it was a case of real impertinence when the Movement was warned of the “non partisan nature” of the EU Public Foundation, as well as the fact that “it has pledged to administer the funds according to EU rules,” in a case where its “partisan nature” was actually being objected to. Unfortunately Mr. Glaser did not list the EU rules of a fair referendum, so we are not in the position to compare them, either to the practice of the Fund, or to the standards of TEAM.

It can be regarded as an odd event of this kind when Otto von Habsburg campaigned in favour of EU membership. A report was written in the village newspaper Írott szó (Written Word) on one of his actions in a big village, Törökbálint, close to the capital and next to the town where German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was born, and where Otto von Hapsburg’s grandfather, Charles IV, as King of Hungary wanted to take over the rule of Hungary by a coup. The biggest argument of Hapsburg was that should the number of ‘Yes’ votes in Hungary be higher than in the other candidate countries, Hungary would be the leader among the new members. Of course, he did not explain the meaning of this leadership. The case highlights the level of the feelings of less educated people he tried to address, while completely misleading them.

A more serious case is that EU Commission President Romano Prodi and Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen personally partook in the campaign.

The requirement that the referendum be ratified according to the States’ own constitutional rules was also broken. Legal experts state that the whole referendum was unconstitutional. Some organisations took the matter to the Constitutional Court, but it refused to take a standpoint, stating that the Court was incompetent to judge on the Constitution itself (some more details are presented in Part 2 of this report). In consequence of this Court decision, the World Alliance of Hungarians sent a letter to Romano Prodi stating that according to the present Constitution the referendum was not legal, so our joining would lack the legal foundation. The letter was published also in the Swiss newspaper Zeit-Fragen in German (No.14, 14/04/2003).

The answer to Question 8 is double No, as some EU officials personally helped the ‘Yes’ campaign, while another was not inclined to become aware of the unlawful conduct of the campaign.

9. Are there voluntarily agreed standards of fairness in the print media?

According to our knowledge there is a Press Law, and the associations of journalists have some Code of Ethics. We do not know their content, but the impression is that they cannot have much to do with everyday practice. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that more than 90% of the Hungarian press is in Western ownership, so their EU commitment is clear. One could read EU criticism only in the rest: only this 10% tried to keep a balance by giving space to both sides.

The answer to Question 9 may formally be Yes, but in practice the answer is NO.

10. Is there provision for impartial monitoring and enforcement of fair referendum rules?

It was quite the opposite. Only the parties in Parliament were allowed to send delegates at the local vote-counting commissions. As all of them were ardent supporters the opposition was completely excluded from monitoring. The National Election Committee refused a request by the Movement for a Free Hungary to send delegates.

Concerning the enforcement of fair referendum rules: nobody has ever told a single word of the fairness of a referendum in the media. This topic was not a question to be discussed or to make provisions for.

So our answer to Question 10 is No.

The cases presented above are only samples of many similar ones to illustrate that the answers to the criteria are founded.

Part II – Further aspects and injurious practices

I. Attitude of the Government and Parliament

Many people are nowadays inclined to think that the “bloody” battle of the leftists and rightists before last year’s parliamentary election did not serve any other purpose than to eliminate two smaller parties from Parliament that were not sufficiently devoted to EU membership. The tactic was successful, so the “mortal enemies” could start their referendum preparations in cloudless harmony and mutual understanding.

The representatives of the four parliamentary parties united their forces and made common tours in the country to persuade people to vote Yes. It was called the “road show”. They used this English term probably because they thought that the usage of English gave a European scent to their “wild east” style of business. The only disharmonic circumstance was when the leftists, according to the leftist tradition, accused the so-called “opposition” of not being sufficiently devoted to EU membership. The reaction was exactly along the pattern of communist days in case of an attack in the mask of the so called “critic of building effect”. It was a passionate protest against, and a refusal of the accusation, strengthened by oaths that this was a defamation as they were always utmostly devoted and enthusiastic.

So the governing parties were completely devoted to the EU, while the parliamentary opposition firmly stated that they were even more devoted. The subject of the debate on the pros and cons, meant to inform people on the advantages and drawbacks of the EU, was whether the EU would be very good, or much better. The most critical opinions admitted that “we would face some difficulties, but in aggregate the advantages would outweigh the drawbacks”.

The Parliament took every possible measure to prevent an unfavourable result. Having learned from the NATO referendum (where the participation was 48%), which was not valid in consequence of low participation, they changed the validity criteria. According to the old rule participation had to exceed 50% for the vote to be valid. Now 25% ‘Yes’ votes are sufficient. (The “rule of law” is illustrated by the fact that although the NATO referendum was not valid, we joined. No NATO members protested against this violation of the rule of law in Hungary.) But that was not enough: the Parliament made a resolution that in case of an unvalidated referendum result they would decide in favour of EU membership of their own right.

Not only the political parties, but also the president himself was publicly committed to EU membership. When a civil association organised an international conference on the EU and wanted to invite the president as honorary chairman, his secretary was completely indignant on the idea of his participation on an event not clearly committed to EU membership.

The prime minister went as far as to declare on a TV program that only less educated people are against the EU, as the EU is a society of knowledge, where uneducated people became marginalized. But he comforted the viewers that they will take care of these people too, so they should not be afraid of their future in the EU. They too can bravely say ‘Yes’. The well-known Bolshevik paternalism reappeared.

In the same program the reporter asked the prime minister whether the “undereducated” opposition is supported sufficiently to express their opinion. The “politically correct” answer of Mr. Medgyessy was, “you ought to put this question to them”.

The main player of the most scandalous case was the minister of agriculture when he visited a small town in the southeastern part of the country, Sarkad. Sarkad is a typical agricultural area suffering from agricultural “restructuring” in line with EU-demands, which is the euphemistic term used instead of ‘crippling it’. People there did not learn the concerns of agriculture from the mainstream press. Earlier there had been a big sugar refinery in Sarkad. After privatisation the new owner disassembled it, took the machinery abroad and closed the factory. Just now the already-reduced animal husbandry is in a crisis. When the local mayor, the host of the assembly, put some questions to the agriculture minister about the planned government measures to prevent the expected growth of unemployment after EU accession, the minister lost his head and in his anger called the mayor’s questions “bullshit”. When the mayor refused that treatment, the minister stood up and dashed out of the hall. It would be of little use to give details about the subsequent unfair actions of the minister. Perhaps it is enough to say that so far he did not make any apology.

It was drilled in people’s head by the politicians and the media that the choice is between “Balkan” or “Europe”. One must apologize to people living in countries in the Balkans for this idiocy, but this was repeated day and night. Like the other slogan, “we are going to Europe”, which they started parroting at the beginning of the nineties. From that time on it was continuously repeated everywhere and every time by all governments, and it was echoed by the whole media.

There were also slogans of emotional blackmailing:

If you like your children and care for their future, you must say yes. If we do not say Yes, we miss the ship and fall behind. If we want to become a respected nation, we must join. Rivers will be cleaner, the air will be fresher, and the sky will be brighter. What one could recognise was a 13-year-long process of brainwashing on a grand scale. No party politician dared say a single word against the EU, except the demonised Party of Hungarian Life and Justice.

II. Constitutional aspects

Respected lawyers’ opinion is that the continuity of the Hungarian constitutionality was broken in 1944, when the German army occupied Hungary, and it is not restored till now. The fact is that from that time on foreign armies have been continuously stationing in Hungary. The situation is the same even now. People were never asked whether the American army should be allowed to come into the country. The legislative meaning of the situation is that the country is not in a position to decide freely on its future.

It is very well known that neither Hitler’s Germany, nor Stalin’s Soviet Union (or what followed) had shown the slightest interest in legal and constitutional problems. And so, it seems, does the EU. All the same, the majority of Hungarians will always know that our joining NATO and the EU is anti-constitutional. That is, we do not join the EU, but are rather occupied by it. In this respect it does not matter much that there are also EU supporters in Hungary. Even the Soviets had supporters. All the same nobody debates now that we were forced by military power to live in the Soviet block, and that we did not choose it on our own.

A surprising fact is that not only highly educated lawyers are of this opinion, but the majority of the so-called people in the street. Moreover, a lot of unconditional supporters of the Socialist Party are convinced that our prospects in the EU are not rosy at all. Their excuse for the behaviour of their party is that their leadership cannot do anything else as they are under irresistible pressure by the EU and it is our good fate that they are in power and not worse people. Others believe that we had to avoid provoking the EU by voting ‘No’ since the consequences would be unbearable.

Everybody remembers very well the case of Austria. And Austria was a member state, while we are outsiders, without industry, without markets, with an economy “restructured” into a perfect dependence on other countries, and deep inside the debt trap. But there are further constitutional problems even on the basis of the present Stalinist constitution. More pleas were submitted to the Constitutional Court on the issue of the constitutional changes made for the sake of the referendum, but they were rejected. The argumentation was that the Court had no right to judge on the Constitution itself. The real message of this situation is that Hungary is a parliamentary despotism. The parliament can do anything without asking anybody if two thirds of the MPs agreed on it. The Constitutional Court made it clear that there is no constitutional control on any decision of the Parliament made by a two-thirds majority. If they decide so, they can introduce slavery, the “jus primae noctis” in favour of MPs or anything else, if a two-thirds majority supports it and they put their decision into the Constitution. Moreover, they can eliminate even this two-thirds limitation the same way. I think we can agree that this is a real mockery of democracy, constitutionality and by reason of the rule of law. But this does not disturb Europe, which fact again characterises the real nature of the EU, as former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin characterized it to a journalist in Nice: they are practical and rational. Why bother with the law and the constitution? It is not practical.

It is worth to look at the way constitutional law is taught at the Hungarian universities. There is an official compendium on it which deducts the civil rights from the self-derogation of the State. Ergo, it is not the people who furnish the State with power to rule over the people. The official principle is quite the opposite. This is pure fascist-bolshevik theory, but it seems to be EU-conforming.

III. Mockery of democracy

I quote a sentence of the “best practice” paper of TEAM: “Citizens’ attitudes to referendum issues transcend governmental and party allegiance.”

You perhaps know that the majority of the ruling coalition in Hungary is very small. To prevent casual minority situations during voting they introduced a very strict discipline. If an MP of the governing parties votes against a bill that was approved by the coalition leaders, he or she could be fined and punished in different ways. And the other parties followed the good example. The EU-membership ratification process in Parliament was an illustrating case to this procedure. There was only one MP, called István Simicskó, a member of FIDESZ, who voted ‘No’. In the aftermath he had to resign all his posts in different parliamentary committees and the decision of his party to accept his resignation was publicly appreciated by the president of the Socialist Party. They believe it is unacceptable for an MP to follow his or her own conscience. When Mr Simicskó was asked about the reason of his decision, his answer was that he found it unfair that nobody represented the ‘No’ side in Parliament. Such a thing cannot be allowed in our present parliamentary democracy. The story shows clearly the level of freedom of conscience and the level of representation of the people in the Parliament of the Republic of Hungary.

IV. Police suppression of EU-critical opinions

It happened many times that the Police apprehended people placing EU-antagonising posters. The most flagrant cases occurred in connection with a poster showing three extended hands with three different symbols: the Nazi swastika, the Soviet star and the EU stars. The first two hands are each shaking hands with a Hungarian hand, while the “EU hand” is extended in the process of shaking a hand. The text reads: “You can also say No!” It would have been more apt to write: “Now you can say No!” as in the other two cases we had no choice whatsoever. The police temporarily arrested five people who had placed it in the street. One youngster and two adults were sentenced to year-long police surveillance by a court in the town of Kaposvár, completely without any basis.

Once the police appeared at the office of the Movement for a Free Hungary without a search warrant, but they made a search and took away all the copies of the poster (about 9000) and three people, including the head of the movement, András Takács. An activist of the Movement was asked by the police by phone to come to the office for interrogation. All the same when he arrived they put him in handcuffs and took him into custody together with the other three. Some hours later, after representations had been made, they let them go. But according to the official expression, the investigation is not yet closed.

The whole story is a clear violation of law and the interference of politics in the work of the judiciary. The accusation was that they used forbidden, despotic symbols. It is an intentional misinterpretation of the law, because the message of the poster was clearly anti-despotic. The law explicitly admits that type of use of the swastika and red star. It is clear that the Police know that their own actions were illegal, as they did not initiate a case against the Movement, which took the responsibility. Their targets were only individuals affixing the posters.

V. The general political atmosphere before the referendum

If we want to get to a deeper understanding of the background of the Hungarian referendum, we have to embed it into a wider political context. For the sake of that it is inevitable to cast a glance on the present political environment of the country.

Just after the parliamentary elections in 2002 a strong wave of Police atrocities started. This is not surprising in a country where the Prime Minister is a former secret agent who worked under the surveillance of the Soviet KGB. The national police superintendent has a similar past. There have been episodes of police brutality against demonstrators whose only sin was that they did not want to leave the site. I believe that it is unnecessary to say that Amnesty International made no objections in this case.

In this context it is worth to speculate a bit on the words of a certain Brian Mitchel, who wrote in the American Investor’s Business Daily (June 25, 2002 Page A-16):

“But who does the West want to run Eastern Europe these days? Party members, apparatchiks and spies. Ex-communists today are the preferred rulers of the former Warsaw Pact. Ex-anti-communists are the new enemy… in this part of the world a large number of communists have, by changing their colours marginally, ended up even more powerful. And all with the blessing if not the active connivance of the West! In country after country, the U.S. and its European allies have worked to defeat popular center-right governments and replace them with left and center-left governments. The aim is to elect governments that are gung-ho for NATO and eager to sell public assets to foreign investors. … Bush’s ambassador to Hungary, Nancy Goodman Brinker, met with leftist leaders before presenting her credentials to the center-right government last fall. Within weeks she was complaining about Hungary’s xenophobia and anti-Semitism. … So when first lady Laura Bush visited Hungary last month, the only newspaper she talked to was Nepszabadsag, a pro-Socialist, anti-Orban newspaper formerly the mouthpiece of the Communist Party.”

That is the case. What makes it more ill omened is the fact that János Kádár established Népszabadság just after the break-down of the revolution of 1956. Today this paper is the only Hungarian paper acceptable to Laura Bush. One cannot avoid asking: What type of changes are characterised by these facts? What can the disease of the Western world be, that produces these symptoms?

The change of the style of governance in Hungary was so eye-catching that last October the European People’s Party drafted their criticism. This June the International Democratic Center (earlier CDI) condemned the antidemocratic practice of the Hungarian government in a resolution. This story is seemingly quite far from our present issue, but only at first sight. The fact is that wide groups of the Hungarian population are aware of the phenomena described above by Mitchell. They can see a big part of it with their own eyes. But even if they do not read the American Investor’s Business Daily, they know that Peter Medgyessy, the former KGB asset under code-name D-209 was given the “Cross of the Legion of Honour” by the French government. They know, that Gyula Horn, the former Prime Minister, a late member of Kádár’s terror brigades, a communist ex-minister of foreign affairs, who is seriously suspected of participation in slaughtering demonstrators in 1956-57, was given some high awards too.

The message of these events to the Hungarian people is clear: they, the decorating and the decorated, are comrades. If one considers the case of the NATO vote, which was invalid, as well as the present behaviour of the governing power and the opposition, what other conclusion can people make, than the one described by George Orwell in Animal Farm: If pigs are walking on two legs, and one is already unable to distinguish pigs from farmers, it means that the only difference to the old days is that they are together ruling upon us in the same way.

Why on earth should people go to vote under such a circumstances? I think this is the explanation of the resignation of the majority of people, which is reflected in the 45% voter turnout.

Before finishing this part I should like to clarify something to avoid any misinterpretation. After reading my above condemnation of the practice of the present government, the reader can casually get to the conclusion that I am a fan of the present opposition. It is not so. They worked together in perfect understanding concerning the outcome of the referendum. The “No-to-EU” side knows very well that the parliamentary opposition did not make any remarks on the violation of human rights when EU-membership was still at stake. But now, that the job is done, they are trying to gain some political advantage over the less sophisticated methods of their partners, which was nothing else but the imprudent application of their own traditional methods. They were a bit hasty in returning to their old practice. Quite casually, their fundamental mentality overcame their reason.

Part III – Summary

The late Soviet emigrant, Wladimir Bukowski made the statement in his lecture in Budapest two years ago that the EU was a new Soviet system. If one ponders over the Hungarian experiences, one gets a strong inclination to accept the words of Mr Bukowski as more than an eye-catching expression.

The great German physicist, Werner Heisenberg wrote that the basis for a right judgement on a political movement or institution must not be its program, slogans or ideology, because the techniques of hiding the real targets by the aid of the listed ones has reached historically unprecedented high levels. A more reliable basis can be to study the applied methods since any unfair methods are the best indicators of unfair targets. If we apply this approach to the EU and consider the strict control of one-sided interests over principles, we cannot get to a comforting conclusion.

Some readers may think that we are an enemy of a Europe-wide close cooperation of nations. It is not the case. Moreover we remonstrate that we and the majority of the citizens of this country support fair European cooperation, including our country. We remonstrate that a lot of people voted ‘Yes’, even if they are aware of the unjust treatment by the EU. This is because they could not give up their belief that the democratic and fair thinking of the peoples living in the member countries sooner or later will overcome the negative tendencies, and will remove or prevent the shadowy consequences we foresee now, by improving the EU.

I do not agree with this opinion. My conviction is that the EU is the work-tool of the international gross capital to get control over the nations of Europe. On this basis I strongly believe that a fair cooperation between the nations of Europe, which can guarantee European peace, which again puts the interests of the people to its natural rights (occupied now by that of gross capital), which provides freedom for the people, and not for gross capital, and which will be able to make effective steps towards the prevention of threatening environmental catastrophes and create the foundation for a sustainable society and economy, can not be created any other way but through being against the EU. Europe must get rid of the burden of the pressure created by transnational gross capital, which slowly distorts the most precious European institutions. This is inevitable if we should really like to give birth to the dream of a Europe of Democracies.

Mihály Dohán is from the Movement for a Free Hungary