“The interview”: Ambassador David Pressman is alarmed by what he saw

When you say they tried to make you look weird or gross, what do these articles say? There’s a whole line of reports that suggest I’m a pedophile, which is quite an extraordinary thing. I am a father of two children. I have been in a relationship with my partner now for almost 24 years. I remember, I was with the ambassadors of the diplomatic corps, marching in the only Pride march outside Budapest in a city called Pécs. It was sort of a ragtag, little one. And as they always were, the cameras of the government media were mainly trained on me, and I remember my colleague, the Irish ambassador, who was there with me, he had brought his daughter. And he had just arrived, and he wanted to introduce me to his daughter, and he leaned over and said, “This is the ambassador of the United States,” and we shook hands. And that evening on the news, the headline story was that the US ambassador is leading the Pride march in Pécs, which is of course absurd, and was surrounded by children, and we also saw him interacting with the children. And it was said in a way that they didn’t need to finish the sentence. The message was clear.

There has been a growing relationship between the right in the United States and in Hungary, which is one of the reasons why Viktor Orban has become better known in America than he might otherwise be. CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) held several conferences in Hungary. We’ve seen thinkers on the right, like the president of the Heritage Foundation, media personalities like Tucker Carlson, incoming vice president JD Vance, express admiration for Orban. What did you observe about that relationship while you were ambassador? As the American ambassador, I want to be a little careful when talking about American politics. But what I will say is that Orban’s government has conveyed to the communities, including the political communities in the United States, that they are a country that supports family values, that they are a country that fights vigilante ideology, that I am a country that is fighting migration. Its slogan is: no migration, no gender, no war – things that resonate in political circles in the United States, but also elsewhere in Europe and the world. But what it does is obscure anything else that’s going on. And what is happening is a very dangerous system of reward and punishment that has been set up in Hungary, where the government has effectively taken control of two things, the money and the media, and then uses those two things to punish the individuals asking questions. or expresses opinions that are dissonant with government policy. And they use their control of the media to make these individuals radioactive. And so, the admiration for the Hungarian government that is sometimes expressed on the basis of some of the social problems or hot political issues, even in the politics of the United States, I often wonder if those individuals really understand the nature of what this government has been. because in its relationship, both with Russia and with China, but also the system of kleptocracy that has taken hold and destroyed the democratic institutions there.

Orban has really changed a lot of things. Like you said, he’s a champion of traditional, quote-unquote “family values.” It repressed LGBTQ rights. He has embraced anti-immigrant positions. Vance spoke admiringly of how Orban has changed higher education in Hungary. Can you explain how Orban did this? What the Hungarian government did was effectively take what were public universities and public assets and transfer them into private hands. They established something called public-private foundations, transferred all the assets of that university to the public-private foundation and then appointed a patron for that foundation who was loyal to the Fidesz party for a lifetime mandate. So what he effectively did was take what were public resources and put them under the unlimited control of a single political party.