He speaks Hungarian fluently and is capable of speaking Chinese as well. The latter is less suprising, considering he spent the whole decade of the 2010s in the "Asian giant", first as head of the China office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, then as director of the regional project "Energy Security and Climate Change". In January 2022 he was appointed director of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, named after the former Belgian prime minister. It is telling what the president of the centre said about him: "with Hefele on board the European People's Party, which is connected by the Martens Institute and the Christian democratic values, can only become stronger." For too long the Europeans had tried to ignore the fact, that violence and war had always lurked nearby in international politics and had hid behind the illusion of "eternal peace".