Budapest
The secret services of various European countries are active ahead of the European elections, fearing attempts at interference by Russia. In France, the DGSI is closely interested in the draft European list put together by Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, former MEP (National Front/National Rally) from 2014 to 2019, whose program “For peace with Russia” is awakening the suspicions. In coordination with identification and display operations carried out in several countries such as France, the Czech Republic and Poland, the Hungarian intelligence services are interested in two French citizens living in Budapest for a long time, reports the economic weekly HVG.
The first is none other than Jean-Luc Schaffhauser’s former parliamentary assistant, Nicolas de Lamberterie. Trained at Sciences Po Strasbourg, activist in the Alsace movement first, he is today almost a “veteran of the Hungarian extreme right”, as HVG calls him. In the second half of the 2000s, he joined the Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement (HVIM), campaigning for the autonomy of the territories lost by Hungary after the First World War and gravitating around the far-right Jobbik party. , then in full rise.
The second person of interest to Hungarian counter-espionage is the Franco-Magyar François Lavallou who moved to Budapest in 2010, where he founded the news site Visegrád Post, under the pseudonym Ferenc Almássy. The two French people work together for this online media which received financial support from the YouTube channel TV Libertés, founded by the former executive of the National Front Martial Bild, as well as from the Hungarian Ministry of Culture which granted it a grant of an amount equivalent to ten thousand euros. However, it should be noted that, for the time being, no link or financing by Russia has been established. “We are neither spies nor paid by Russia,” responded François Lavallou, who denounced “pre-election McCarthyism against a backdrop of conspiracy.”
This is not the case for the Voice of Europe news site based in the Czech Republic. On March 27, Prime Minister Petr Fiala announced that the Czech intelligence services (BIS) had uncovered a propaganda network directed and financed by Moscow with the aim of “undermining territorial integrity, sovereignty and the independence of Ukraine”. The site was taken offline and its head, Viktor Medvedchuk, was placed on the national sanctions list against Russia. According to BIS, “its content was controlled and financed directly by the Russian Federation. Moscow’s money has also been used to pay some political representatives who spread Russian propaganda. […] One of the objectives was to try to influence the elections for the European Parliament”.
In Hungary, Nicolas de Lamberterie and François Lavallou are close to László Toroczkai, president of the far-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party, which occupies 6 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly. The latter demonstrated against NATO a month after the invasion of Ukraine and recently spoke out in favor of a return of the Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia to Hungarian rule. At the end of August 2023, Nicolas de Lamberterie and László Toroczkai participated in a gathering in Budapest of members of the Swedish, Swiss, Czech and Bulgarian far-rights, with a view to an alliance in the European parliament. This in the presence of Guillaume Pradoura, parliamentary assistant successively of the French RN, the German AfD and the Dutch FVD, and who would be the European emissary of Jean-Luc Schaffhauser.
All this is nothing new, reminds HVG journalist András Dezső. At the turn of the 2010s, a Hungarian MEP from the Jobbik party, named Béla Kovács, attempted to bring about a union of European nationalist parties favorable to a rapprochement with Moscow. Sentenced in 2022 by Hungarian courts to five years in prison for espionage against the institutions of the European Union, he disappeared from the radar. According to András Dezső, he is… In Russia, where he obtained refugee status.