PM Orbán meets Chancellor Merkel
February 12th, 2020Commenting on the meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán which lasted several hours on Monday, a pro-government columnist suggests that the Hungarian PM was received in Berlin as a European leader worthy of respect and attention.
In its report on the summit, Magyar Nemzet quotes Ms Merkel in its headline praising Hungary’s economic policies. In an opinion column on the meeting, Levente Sitkei deplores the modern habit, ‘inherited from World War Two’ of interpreting the world in two opposing blocks, each considering the other as an expression of Evil. Thus two allies, President Trump and Ms Merkel, have been paradoxically framed by the liberal-leaning mainstream media as enemies, with the German Chancellor depicted as ‘the leader of the free world’, Sitkei suggests. He recalls that in a similar vein, the mainstream media consistently expected Ms Merkel to publicly scorn Mr Orbán as a representative of the opposite side. That never happened, nor has it happened this time, he claims, when the main controversy over allowing illegal immigrants and distributing them among European countries on a mandatory basis is a matter of the past. All in all, despite expectations from the liberal side, Mr Orbán was met in Berlin as an important European politician whose opinion is worth listening to, rather than as an unpleasant guest, Sitkei concludes.