Election 2018 – Former Socialist-Párbeszéd candidate Karácsony accuses government of listing so-called opponents

No matter the size of Fidesz’s mandate, the ruling party is not authorised to intimidate its citizens, Gergely Karácsony, former PM candidate of the Socialist-Párbeszéd alliance, said on Thursday in reaction to business weekly Figyelő’s list of people whom it called “George Soros’s mercenaries”.

Figyelő “has stupidly listed citizens who do their jobs as members of civil groups, aren’t the enemies of anyone, except maybe poverty, corruption and riding roughshod over democracy”, Karácsony told a news conference.

He said anyone who saw such people as enemies proved that their real enemy was the “the desire of citizens to make the country better”.

Karácsony said that in the run-up to Hungary’s general election, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had threatened the people and political parties who wanted change and had “talked about the 2,000 enemies of the Orbán regime“.

He said the Socialist-Párbeszéd alliance would use any political means it could to “put an end to the politics of intimidation“.

The former PM candidate called it a “strange twist of history” that the list had been published in a magazine owned by Maria Schmidt, director of the House of Terror Museum. That museum was established to present the horrors of the 20th century so nobody in Hungary should ever again have to be afraid of being on a government list, Karácsony said.