“Everything they say is lies, everything they say has no connection whatsoever to the legislation that we approved in the interest of protecting children,” Szijjártó said.

The legislation, he added, declares that children must be defended from paedophiles, on the one hand, and that the education of children regarding sexual orientation is exclusively the right of parents, on the other.

“The liberal mainstream’s suggestion that the law discriminates against some groups of society is a lie,” he said.

Commenting on the matter of the legislation becoming an issue at the recent European Union summit as well as at a EURO2020 match between Hungary and Germany, Szijjártó said “the liberal mainstream is incapable of accepting that, in Hungary, the patriotic government, which operates on the basis of the mandate of the Hungarian people, makes the national interest a priority”.

He said “they cannot stand” that Hungary’s government has won three parliamentary elections in a row, that Hungary achieved one of the highest rates of economic growth in Europe before the crisis, and that policy measures addressing the challenges of the coronavirus crisis were “among the most successful, both economically and in terms of health care”, so they “find something wrong with every single one of our laws”, even before the text is available in Hungarian.

The foreign minister said the illumination by Amnesty International of the Hungarian embassy in The Hague with rainbow colours for an hour on Friday, “with the assistance and support of local authorities”, was “an unprecedented incident”.

He added that the act runs counter to the practices of international law and diplomacy which ensure defence by the host country of every embassy against all kinds of insults.

Commenting on the work of the recently established operative board for jump-starting the economy, which he heads, Szijjártó said the government had already approved the body’s first proposals, including one to broaden support for research and development by lowering the eligibility threshold for subsidies for investments from 3 million euros to 1 million euros and the one for job creation to ten.

To ensure export development, regulations governing Hungary’s Eximbank have been made more flexible, and a framework for supporting Hungarian companies’ investments abroad has been established, while rules on employment have been streamlined to support job creation, he added.