Dear Editor,

With his opinion article, "Stopping the authoritarian rot in Europe," Kenneth Roth joins what are now dozens of critics who have turned to accommodating international media outlets to criticize the Orbán government and insult the Hungarian people with the charge that Hungary's extraordinary measures to fight Covid-19 amount to "dictatorship."

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What these critics will not tell you is that Hungary's measures – thus far – have been effective in flattening the curve, supporting the health care system, and saving Hungarian lives.

"The data shows," said Ledia Lazeri of the World Health Organization in an interview earlier this week, "that Hungary succeeded in avoiding the exponential growth [of confirmed coronavirus cases]."

They also ignore the fact that these measures are popular with the Hungarian people.

Nearly 60 percent, according to a recent poll, said the extraordinary measures should be extended until the end of the pandemic.

While the director of Human Rights Watch gazes at his navel in Geneva, fretting about "authoritarian rot," the Hungarian people look for a steady hand at the rudder to navigate this storm.

They also conveniently omit the fact that many EU states have imposed a state of emergency and some give the government sweeping powers.

A minister of health in Germany can issue a directive even if there are constitutional concerns that it contradicts the law. The federal government in Switzerland rules via directive, bypassing the legislature. In Spain, the parliament remains in session but cannot question the government.

But Roth and his cohorts seem unconcerned about dictatorship in those countries.

They omit these details because what we're dealing with is not a legal problem, not a "breach" of the rule of law. Quite the contrary.

Roth arrives a couple of weeks late to the party, but copying and pasting from all the other Op-Eds written by western critics who have drawn from the same liberal, Hungarian sources, he levels exactly the same charges we've read so many times before and, like the rest of them, offers nothing to back them up.

"Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party," writes Roth, "have politicised the courts, decimated independent media, destroyed academic freedom, hobbled civil society".

On courts, media, academic freedom and civil society, where the Orbán government actions or laws have been challenged by the European Commission, we have addressed them.

TV and internet media outlets that are staunch critics of the government enjoy a commanding lead in audience share and page views, but according to Roth, Orbán decimated independent media.

Joseph Goebbels, they say, wrote that "if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

They can make outrageous and condescending insults like Roth does – "Ten million EU citizens now live under authoritarian rule" – and none of them have to offer any proof of their claims.

A compliant mainstream media allows them to dismiss, or ignore altogether, the ample, fact-based counter-arguments. It has become, as György Schöpflin wrote recently, a discourse that "is immutable and beyond questioning," claims "that cannot be interrogated."

"To anyone who has lived in a Soviet-type system," adds Schöpflin, "this all sounds very familiar indeed."

Isn't it odd that at a time when Europe faces its most serious crisis in 100 years, a clique of the liberal elite would insist that the most serious problem today is a government in a small country in central Europe doing everything it can to protect the health and economic livelihood of its citizens?

At a time when the action of sovereign national governments have proven effective, it's time to stop the globalist rot undermining European solidarity.

Yours,

Zoltan Kovacs