Navracsics not accepted as Commissionar of Culture
While Alice Bah-Kuhnke becomes the new Minister for Culture and Democracy in Sweden, it is clear that Hungary's Tibor Navracsics will not be accepted by the European Parliament's Committee on Culture.
- I do not want to risk ending up in a situation like the one Orbán [Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister] described the other day. He said that "now that our Navracsic get this portfolio, we will be able to more or less export Hungarian policies on the EU level." This should of course not happen, says Cecilia Wikström, Swedish MEP to Swedish Radio.
After the Parliament's Cultural Committee said no to Hungary's Tibor Navracsics as Commissioner, the question is what is now happening with him. The options are that he gets another portfolio or that he may not be the commissioner at all.
This has happened:
In the new European Commission which takes office 1 November, President-elect Jean-Claude Juncker, proposed Tibor Navracsics - current minister of Foreign Affairs in Viktor Orban's Government in Hungary - as new Commissioner of Culture, following Androulla Vassiliou of Cyprus. The proposal has already sparked off protests. Not least due to the Hungarian Government's restrictions on freedom of speech and the country's conservative culture policy, to put it mildly, and confirmed by Hungarian festival colleagues in recent years. But, says festival voices in Budapest and in Brussels, the EU is not Viktor Orban's Hungary and those SMF talked to are cautiously positive that Tibor Navracsics will need to adapt to his new Office. In Hungary he is described as interested in education and in culture.
A festival scholar in Hungary predicts:
- "Tibor Navracsics is an intelligent, good mannered person, whom I last saw in person at a classical concert. He nevertheless gave his name (and maybe his conviction) as deputy prime minister and minister for justice to all those hurried changes that replaced the previous constitution and the related parliamentary acts with ones that serve an increasingly totalitarian political system. However, the outcome might be very positive. Either because he tries to compensate and act as a diligent European, or because his better and true self can be set free when he is not under the pressure of Orbán"
The Association of Swedish Music festivals are members of EFA, European Festivals Association, and Kathrin Deventer, Secretary General of EFA, states
-" I have talked to members of the European Parliament and they said that the commissioner for culture has to learn to be ‘European’, and trans-national. And because of this need to learn, he might have very open ears and eyes! I will together with Mrs Doris Pack - the chair of the EU Committee on Culture and Education (since 2009) - have a meeting with the new commissioner in December, once he is appointed; and we will prepare a first crucial Commissioner – EFA meeting at the beginning of 2015!
Other links (in Swedish)
SR Kulturnytt: Därför kritiseras EU:s blivande Kulturkommissionär.