Eleni Kounalakis, who was the US ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013, recently published a memoir about her service entitled – Madam Ambassador, Three Years of Diplomacy, Dinner Parties and Democracy in Budapest. The book contains critical remarks of the Orbán government.
Now Ambassador Kounalakis has written an opinion piece in The New York Times calling Mr. Orbán a xenophobe. She is deeply troubled by Mr. Orbán’s method of dealing with Europe’s refugee crisis. “Recently, Austrian authorities found a freight truck abandoned by human traffickers along the highway from Budapest to Vienna, in which 71 refugees died of asphyxiation. When I saw the images, I couldn’t help thinking of the cattle cars used to deport 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Nazi death camps in World War II” – she writes. (NYT article here.)
In May 2015 Ambassador Kounalakis had a book-signing at the Hungarian Heritage Festival at Twin Pines Park, Belmont, California. (Photo with Neumann Society volunteers).
These are harsh words from someone well-connected in US politics. California Governor Jerry Brown last year appointed Ms. Kounalakis as head of his advisory council on international trade, an important position in California which has the fifth largest economy in the world. She is a fundraiser in the Democratic Party with close ties to powerful mentors ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Ms. Kounalakis also works closely with Tamás Fellegi, who heads the controversial The Hungary Initiatives Foundation and is considered a close confidant of Mr. Orbán. Last March Fellegi’s foundation financed and Ms. Kounalakis helped to stage the Neumann Society’s conference called “Hunnovators” in San Francisco, California.
Mr. Fellegi and Ms. Kounalakis at the Hunnovators Conference in March 2015.
Why would Mr. Fellegi pay Hungarian taxpayer money for a conference where the ex-Ambassador is the star? And why would he back the Neumann Society which is popularizing Kounalakis’s book that criticizes Orbán? (Amb. Kounalakis’s video advertising the conference.)
It seems that Mr. Fellegi and his friends have concluded that Mr. Orbán’s days are numbered; his corrupt and authoritarian regime is getting closer to an eventual fall. Mr. Fellegi is aware of the fact that the US has already blacklisted several senior Orbán-government officials, barring them from the US for alleged corruption. This was an unusual move against a NATO ally and an EU state.
Mr. Fellegi and Ms. Kounalakis are coordinating strategy.
So Mr. Fellegi is building alliances with Orbán’s US critics. He is a smart political survivor who thinks it’s time to start planning for the times after Orbán. He knows that Orbán’s Hungarian-American “supporters” are engaged in double talk; they declare loyalty to Budapest in Hungarian, while distancing themselves from Orbán in English. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day in the future Mr. Fellegi would triumphantly claim the he cleverly supported (and even financed!) Mr. Orbán’s opposition in the United States.
Orbán has bigger problems than being called a xenophobe in the NYT, he needs to watch his back. He has tamed his political opposition at home, but some of his “friends” overseas are sharpening their knives.
György Lázár
