BUDAPEST, Hungary — The front-runner in Hungary's parliamentary election said on Monday that an alleged backchannel between Budapest and Moscow should be investigated as “treason" after the Washington Post reported that Hungary’s government has for years provided Russia with detailed information from EU Council meetings.
Péter Magyar, the main political opponent of Hungary's long-serving leader Viktor Orbán, said in a social media post that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjárto “appears to be colluding with Russia, thereby betraying Hungarian and European interests."
“If confirmed, this would amount to treason, which carries a potential life sentence. A future TISZA government will immediately investigate the matter,” Magyar wrote.
Tisza is Hungary’s main opposition party that is currently ahead in the polls three weeks before parliamentary elections. Their victory would unseat Orbán's nationalist Fidesz party, which took power in 2010.
The Post, citing several current and former European security officials, found that Orbán’s government has long offered Moscow access to sensitive discussions within the European Union.
During breaks at EU meetings like last Thursday's summit of the bloc's 27 leaders, Szijjárto made regular phone calls to provide his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with "live reports on what's been discussed" and possible solutions, one of the European security officials said.
Through such calls, “every single EU meeting for years has basically had Moscow behind the table,” the official said.
Szijjárto has made 16 official visits to Moscow since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, most recently on March 4 when he met with President Vladimir Putin. Szijjárto's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Orbán said he had instructed his government to launch a probe into alleged “wiretapping” of Szijjárto he claims is evidenced in the Post report.
“The wiretapping of a government member is a serious attack on Hungary. I have instructed the Minister of Justice to immediately investigate the information regarding the wiretapping of Péter Szijjártó,” Orbán said in a social media post. The European Commission said it was seeking information directly from Hungary concerning the allegations.
“A relationship of trust between member states and between the institution is fundamental for the work of the EU,” said commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper on Monday. “We expect the Hungarian government to provide clarifications.”
Relations between Hungary and fellow EU members, strained since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, took a nosedive this month after Orbán backtracked on an agreement to provide Kyiv with a 90-billion euro ($104 billion) loan.
"The news that Orbán's people inform Moscow about EU Council meetings in every detail shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone," Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has often clashed with Orbán, in a social media post Sunday. "We've had our suspicions about that for a long time. That's one reason why I take the floor only when strictly necessary and say just as much as necessary."
___ McNeil reported from Brussels.
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