Anniversary of Hungary’s first post-Communist freely elected parliament
Budapest, May 6 (MTI) – Fulfilling the dream of a civic Hungary as it was conceived of 25 years ago is the government’s main goal over the next three years, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a conference marking the anniversary of Hungary’s first post-Communist freely elected parliament in 1990.
The government now has the authority and strength to implement the programme for a civic Hungary, Orban told the event in Parliament on Wednesday.
“This needed twenty years of struggles, a victorious constitutional reform and five years of devoted efforts, cleaning up the ruins and laying the foundations,” he added.
Parliamentary speaker Laszlo Kover told the event that the failed expectations and disappointments notwithstanding, the post-communist transformation was the only turning point in Hungarian 20th century history that had not brought about losses or imprisonment but at least a partial restoration of self-government, freedom and independence. The symbolic date of May 2, when parliament was set up a quarter of a century ago, represented the transfer from dictatorship to democracy, from communism to a state governed by the rule of law, and from the people’s republic to a republic, he added.
Referring to the 1989-1990 period, the prime minister said that the relationship today to events of the time are by no means direct or unbreakable. From the vantage point of that period, “perhaps we would not believe that through so many failures, in such a short time, we would have come so far.” Yet from today’s perspective, “we see the negative aspects and mistakes,” he said, noting the million jobs that disappeared in the period following the change in political system, lost markets to the East and “spontaneous” privatisations.
Until 2010 the majority of Hungarians felt they were the losers of the change in political system. “Along the way the energy, dynamism and enthusiasm that was engendered at the start of the 1990s was broken.” Then after the 2008 financial crisis, after 40 years of communism, trust in unregulated markets and liberal democracy evaporated, Orban said. Now ever fewer people see the positives of the change of regime and ever more who can only see the downsides, he added.
The market brought to light everything that communism had hidden from sight for so long, he said, noting joblessness, inflation, real market prices and the crisis of big industry. There were those who wanted to “go back to sleep” and return with nostalgia to the period of Janos Kadar, Hungary’s communist-era leader, Orban said, adding that in 1994 anyone who entered the election campaign promising only solutions in line with the country’s possibilities did not have a chance of winning.
The clear turning point was in 2006, when former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany made his infamous “lies speech”, Orban said. Besides the 2008 economic crisis, there was a crisis of trust which only ended in 2010, he added.
After two decades of “delay”, the Hungarian people “enacted a revolution” in 2010, the prime minister said. The electorate gave sufficient power to do what was needed for Hungary, he added. “Who would have thought in 1994 that our political community would bring about a two-thirds majority and bring to its fruition the missing revolution?” In 2014, Hungarians finally put a full stop after several decades of debates by authorising the second two-thirds, he said.
Orban said the past five years had shown that by acting together “we can turn around seemingly hopeless things,” referring to “sparking the economy, freeing families and local councils from debt servitude, taxing multinationals and banks, and sending the IMF home.”
The prime minister also mentioned the introduction of “Europe’s most state-of-the-art constitution” which, he said, had ensured implementation of the most difficult and biggest structural and economic transformation, unlike the 1949 constitution which “failed to bind successive governments to the interests of the nation.”
“We protect families, we give work instead of benefits, we stand up for Hungarian interests in Brussels and we have recaptured national sovereignty, too,” Orban said. “We fought the good fights; it was merry, manly work. We thank the ladies for their help,” he added.
Photo: MTI
Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters