The Ugar Has Finally Received an Answer from the RMDSZ!

We're joking, but it's actually serious.

Back in June, Ugar was the only outlet in the Romanian Hungarian press to ask Hunor Kelemen what minority issues the party would represent during the coalition negotiations. We wrote in an earlier article that the RMDSZ didn't even deign to answer Ugar – for them only the press they can control, in part or in whole, exists.

We had to wait until today to get an answer to the question. As expected, it wasn't a favorable one.

Yesterday, in a thin list of points about the coalition negotiations on his Facebook page, Hunor Kelemen stated the following:

And the rights of minority communities must be protected.

With this, Hunor Kelemen admitted — indeed, proudly declared — that the RMDSZ's minority government program amounts to zero. They are preparing to enter government on the basis that everything should stay exactly as it is.

In Romania, where the one-million-strong Hungarian community still hasn't been granted the promised institutional autonomy — instead we have our RMDSZ — and where, in fact, worse things happen every day, a glaring example is that the assets of Hungarian common-land associations are being re-nationalized, while the RMDSZ sits comfortably in government and stays deeply silent — to quote Kelemen, "protecting the rights of minority communities." Let's not even go into the other blatant slaps in the face carried out with the RMDSZ's effective assistance; suffice it to say that a monk was illegally thrown out of a Catholic monastery at the crack of dawn, or there's the other notorious case, MOGYE, where we likewise shrug off the illegality — except when the RMDSZ stages a comedy about it, dragging students back and forth. Even there, the problem isn't the law, but the self-serving "Hungarian representation" twiddling its thumbs, and the voters, who are perfectly fine with things exactly as they are and forgive the tulip everything.

And the stripping away of minority rights doesn't actually work the way the RMDSZ theater performs it.

It works differently.

It's important to see that, since the fall of communism, Romania has never withdrawn, at the legislative level, a minority right that the Hungarian community actually exercised. At the legislative level, a minority right has been withdrawn only once, in 2019. It was a legal provision that the Hungarian community in Romania didn't make use of at all.

The law repealed at the time stated that in a given administrative unit, if the proportion of the Hungarian population fell below 20%, certain minority rights would still remain in force. As a result, it is now always the most recent census that counts in this regard, not the one from 1992 or 2002.

So it's clear: what matters isn't just what's written on paper, but also whether the Hungarians of Romania — be they intellectuals, politicians, or voters — are tongue-tied, or whether they routinely stand up for themselves.

So coming out with this sentence meant for the government program — that "the rights of minority communities must be protected" — is once again a certificate of poverty from Hunor Kelemen, since in reality the RMDSZ doesn't protect these rights at all; in fact, compared to the majority, they undermine them to a far greater degree. Moreover, no minority right is under threat at the legislative level, and if one were, the RMDSZ's personnel wouldn't be able to fend it off anyway, since they have the opposite interest and were selected specifically to be unfit for the task.

Rights in government, especially amid heavy silence, can only be lost; they can be protected only if people actually exercise them, UDMR or no UDMR. If people don't exercise their rights, then in practice those rights don't exist, and their theoretical possibility can be revoked with a single stroke of the pen — no circus, no resistance, not even slashing all four tires of an SUV, not even a quiet murmur afterward.

Did you, for instance, know that the minority right described above was withdrawn in 2019? There you go.

Yet the newspapers wrote about it, and recently "our own" even staged a little comedy about it, pulling it out of the shed in a joint performance with AUR and the Romanian Hungarian press.

So this empty discourse, like Hunor Kelemen's, will nonetheless end up leading to minority rights being withdrawn. Because we don't even know our own rights. But then, who does it hurt if the right doesn't exist in practice anyway? At least then the law would reflect reality, wouldn't it?

Hm?