“We Hungarians have been struggling against the use of disgraceful double standards against us for many long years,” Fidesz MEP Tamas Deutsch told MTI in a video message. But in recent days, irrefutable evidence has emerged that the left had institutionalised the use of double standards against Hungary, he added. Individuals linked to Soros’s network “have come clean” on the “manipulative methods they use to spread blatant lies and smears about Hungary”, he said.

Karolina Punset, a Spanish Liberal MEP, Andrei Nosko, director of the Open Society Foundations, Matyas Kalman, a journalist who used to work at news portals 24.hu and Index, and Dalibor Rohac, a research fellow at an American research institute, have admitted that — regardless of what they may say in public — the “true enemies of freedom of speech” are not Hungary and Poland, but the “representatives of political correctness” in Brussels, Deutsch said.

The mainstream media has been laying into Hungary and Poland without having presented any real arguments against them, he added.

Deutsch said Punset, Nosko, Kalman and Rohac had conceded that most NGOs, “including the Soros-affiliate Amnesty International”, exercised control over foreign journalists, and that Brussels applied double standards against Hungary not just on political but also on economic issues. “One of them has even proudly admitted to having hired journalists on multiple occasions to promote the deceitful materials of the Soros organisations,” Deutsch said.

“So is it even a question anymore?” he said, adding that “this must not remain without consequence.”