New Hungarian President Katalin Novák’s first visit to Romania has sparked outrage. Among other things, a snapshot of a mountain – it was a private visit from Novák – did some Romanians the wrong way.
The president climbed the Piatra Secuiului in Transylvania, which is home to a large Hungarian community. Above is a stone that people paint alternately in the Romanian (red-yellow-blue) and the Hungarian (red-white-green) tricolor. When Novák was standing next to it, the flag was obviously Hungarian.
She also visited cities of Cluj-Napoca and Alba Iulia, where Novák attended the celebration of the Unity Day of the Hungarian Church, unveiled a new statue and met the leader of RMDSZ, the largest Hungarian political party in Romania. In addition to the rather political interpretation of her private trip, some remarks aroused annoyance among the neighbors.
Novák wrote on Twitter that she “represents all Hungarian citizens” wherever they live. “Hungarians are Hungarians, period.” On the Hungarian public broadcaster she said: ‘We will never cut the umbilical cord between the homeland and the Hungarians who have ended up outside our borders.’ The Romanian government stated that a head of state cannot make such claims on the citizens of another country.
Former Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase (PSD) gasped in an opinion piece in the online newspaper Evenimentul Zileic that the visit was ‘not official, not touristic, but a political provocation’. “She came to Transylvania and pretended the Romanians didn’t exist,” journalist Cristian Tudor Popescu told television channel Digi24† He argued that Romania should focus on ‘living together and dialogue’ in contrast to Hungary’s ‘vengeful and revisionist attitude’.
More than a century ago, Transylvania belonged to Austria-Hungary. As the loser of the First World War, this ‘dual monarchy’ was divided. Various population groups successfully argued for a state of their own in the peace agreements. Romania was assigned a large area, including Transylvania, which was partly inhabited by Romanians. It was accepted that Hungarians also lived within the borders of all those new states.
Millions of Hungarians ended up outside the old national borders as a result of the so-called Treaty of Trianon, a national trauma that remained unprocessed throughout the twentieth century. Romania has a Hungarian minority of 1.2 million souls out of 19 million inhabitants. Orbán has been making political money out of Trianon for years. Hungarians across the border were given passports and voting rights; in Hungary itself, history still strikes a chord.
Relations between the Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania are generally good, despite recurring (and predictable) diplomatic riots. But Hungary’s influence since Orbán came to power has gone beyond historic voting, again an interesting exposé on the Romanian news site shows PressOne, which appeared a few days before Novák’s visit. The ethnic Hungarian journalist Zoltán Sipos tells how most Hungarian-language media in Romania have been housed in a foundation of the Hungarian government in recent years.
And, once the RMDSZ party was ‘moderate, that is, alien to ideological excesses of any kind’, it now increasingly follows the Budapest line. Recently, parliamentarians from this party passed a law against ‘popularizing’ the LGBTI community and gender reassignment, not fundamentally different from Hungary’s highly controversial anti-LGBTI legislation.
The chill of Novák’s trip to Transylvania obscured the more sinister undercurrent of Orbán’s foreign policy, a greater source of concern than a rock on a mountain. Incidentally, it has now been given the Romanian tricolor again, Romanian media reported on Tuesday.
Arnout le Clercq is a correspondent in Warsaw.