(Bloomberg) — Hungary’s president pardoned a far-right figure convicted of terrorism hours before meeting Pope Francis in Budapest, a decision that risks damaging the optics of the pontiff’s visit with a highly charged domestic issue.
(Bloomberg) — (Bloomberg) — Hungary’s president pardoned a far-right figure convicted of terrorism hours before meeting Pope Francis in Budapest, a decision that risks damaging the optics of the pontiff’s visit with a highly charged domestic issue.
The pardon, issued late Thursday by President Katalin Novak, came on the eve of the Pope’s three-day visit. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has tried to play up Francis’s trip to Hungary to shore up his international image after confrontations with the US and the European Union over the war in Ukraine and accusations of democratic backsliding.
Novak will welcome the Pope to Budapest at a ceremony at the presidential palace on Friday morning hours after she issued the pardon for Gyorgy Budahazy. A figure with folk-hero status among the country’s far right, Budahazy radicalized Orban’s efforts to oust a center-left government before the nationalist premier returned power in 2010.
Budahazy was convicted for participating in attacks against the homes of ministers and ruling party members of the Socialist-Liberal coalition that governed from 2006 and 2010. He’s also widely known for his anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic views.
“The Pope’s visit is a special occasion for the head of state to exercise her right to issue pardons,” Novak, tapped by Orban for the largely ceremonial post last year, said in a statement. She also pardoned a handful of Budahazy’s co-conspirators, after absolving others convicted of lesser crimes in the same case in December.
Orban has bashed the EU and NATO members for providing weapons and money to Ukraine to help it fight off Russia’s invasion, enraging the leadership in Kyiv and Hungary’s western allies. The Hungarian leader has sought to portray his stance as pro-peace, which he says is only shared in Europe by the Vatican.
The Pope is praying for a “just peace,” with Russian troops withdrawing from Ukraine, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister, was quoted as saying in a Feb. 23 interview in the Jesuit magazine America.
Francis will lead an invocation for peace in Ukraine on Sunday at a Mass outside Hungary’s parliament that’s expected to draw tens of thousands of people.
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