“Defending Hungarian national culture, in a broader sense, means protecting the civilisation and culture of the whole of Europe,” Kövér said in his interview, adding that “we are the security and future of Europe”.

Concerning Europe, Kövér said that Christian ethics was the continent’s spiritual basis, supported by “Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the Ten Commandments”.

He insisted that the values built on those foundations are now being jeopardised by “massive immigration of people coming from different cultures, who won’t even respect Europe’s written law let alone non-written rules of ethics”, as well as by those that “manage, help, and propagate organised migration in order to loosen up and eliminate that spiritual basis”.

Defending Europe means “protecting the sanctity of the family and of marriage and women’s equal dignity”, Kövér said. He added that “women and men could never be equal because of their biological characteristics, but it does not mean that they should not be equal in terms of their human dignity.”

On another subject, Kövér said that parliament in the current cycle would be working to adopt laws “aimed at regulating the government’s room for manoeuvre”. He argued that in the past 28 years parliament “has not been able to appropriately control executive power”.

Increasing parliamentary control will be a top priority for the next four years, the house speaker added. In an interview with commercial Echo TV, Kövér said that the migration crisis in Europe had

made everyone realise that Europe is facing an unprecedented challenge. “There are powers outside Europe that make formal or informal attempts to intervene,” he added.

Asked to comment on his earlier remarks on “cultural autonomy”, he said it meant that a community decides “what values should be followed by future generations and this affects mass communications, as well as public education and higher education”.

Commenting on literature, he said “we have not banned any works or writers” and added that equal chances cannot be guaranteed without political efforts and external influence.

Answering a question about the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he said “there are some academics who are in their current position only as a result of political decisions made before 1990” and there are those who are not members “only because the communists robbed them from their title”.

“We should decide what the academy is” and if it is purely a scientific body “we must tidy it up”, he added.

Commenting on a recent government decision to discontinue state-funded courses on gender studies in Hungarian colleges and universities, he said autonomy does not mean that academics or teachers stand outside of society and when it comes to such an “extremity” as including gender studies in the official curriculum, “it is necessary to take action.”

MTI Photo