Marching towards a dictatorship, says Jobbik deputy leader

This press release published on Márton Gyöngyösi Facebook-account:

I have contemplated a lot whether or not to write about the state of our public discourse or about where the increasingly aggressive remarks of our politicians or public figures may lead to. One reason for my uncertainty was the fact that this issue had regularly been used by certain political actors for their own agenda; typically with less than enough justification. The other reason was “let the cobbler stick to his last”: it is not necessarily a fortunate thing if politicians publish moral commentaries and try to take the bread out of the mouths of “ the professionals”, i.e., publicists and philosophers.

It’s never a good idea to talk of the devil but I am afraid there is much more than that here: we are no longer facing marginal statements, slips of the tongue or the occasional badly-worded sentence. Instead, it is a process with an unforeseeable end. That’s why we have to talk about it.

On March 15 last year, Viktor Orbán threatened anyone with even just slightly different views on the world with a moral, political and legal retribution.

These words did not come from the mouth of a marginal, minor party leader or an inexperienced political upstart but from that of the Prime Minister. The sowed seeds seem to have sprouted and the members of the political side which used to proudly call itself civic are now a rich source of the seeds of hatred. Their message is that if you are not with us, you are simply a nobody. This was what Fidesz members sang in the evening of April 8, thus sending a message well in advance to anyone who was not a member of their branch. Now it’s part of Fidesz’ folklore in the form of a moderately sophisticated song. Of course, these things are still not enough for some people: the owner of Fidesz Membership Card No. 5, i.e., Zsolt Bayer keeps throwing much worse curses at basically anyone who is not a Fidesz supporter. (An online magazine recently published an article comparing some of his utterances with the radio broadcasts that instigated the massacre of 800 thousand people in Rwanda in 1994. The difference was not big.) I could go on with this list all the way to the latest harangue by the mayor of Érd.

Everybody have their bad days and since public figures are only human, they do make imprudent, bad statements on occasion, too.

Not all genuinely or seemingly bad remarks are motivated by evil intentions and I would rather refrain from assuming the opposite. However, what we see in Hungary in 2019 is much more than some unfortunate slips of the tongue. What we see here is that the governing party and its leaders ignore the half of the country which did not vote for them. Aware of the dominant position arising from being in government, they shamelessly threaten or humiliate those other people, and use every available forum to make them feel ignored.