Hungarian opposition parties mark 1956 anniversary

Hungarian opposition parties marked the anniversary of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising on Monday.

Democratic Coalition

Ferenc Gyurcsány, the leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition, said at an event recorded earlier in Budapest: “October 23rd has ceased to be a joint celebration of the nation.” He said government officials and “we who preserve the [real] celebration” had marked the day in separate locations and in a different spirit.

Drawing a parallel between the present day and 1956, Gyurcsány insisted that the West had brought “the promise of a freer, more independent country”, while “Russia threatens the free peoples of Europe”. He said Hungarian powerholders “lied” by insisting the threat came from Brussels.

As we wrote today, the Hungarian foreign ministry said, the West watched with sympathy but forgot to help.

Jobbik-Conservatives

Márton Gyöngyösi, the leader of Jobbik-Conservatives, called his party “the spiritual heirs of the revolution”. Speaking at the monument of 1956 martyr Péter Mansfeld in Budapest, Gyöngyösi noted that at the founding event Jobbik had received a Hungarian flag from revolutionary fighter Gergely Pongrátz.

The party’s mission, Gyöngyösi said, remained “resistance against Communists and to topple this regime one day”.

“Today Budapest is ruled by a government that receives its orders from Moscow … and it has the same approach to young people as its Communist predecessors.”

Fidesz, he added, had imposed “closed borders, dwindling education, ridiculous wages and cheap Russian propaganda” on Hungarian youth.

Socialists

Socialist co-leader Ágnes Kunhalmi has called for joint action against the “incumbent authoritarian rule” in Hungary, and insisted that the country was lacking “democratic conditions”.

Speaking at her party’s commemoration of the outbreak of the 1956 anti-Soviet revolt in Kaposvár, in south-western Hungary late on Sunday, Kunhalmi said “those that seek to play domestic democracy in a fundamentally anti-democratic environment have failed to understand . the message of young people fighting for freedom, prosperity, and progress back then.”

The Socialist Party fights for “freedom for the country and its society, a democratic rule of law, prosperity for the general public, and social security”, the politician said.

The Socialists consider Imre Nagy, prime minister in 1956, the leader of the failed revolution, and reject the government’s endeavours to “suppress, question, or even deny his political role”, Kunhalmi said. The martyred prime minister “always stayed a leftist and his taking the responsibility and all risks clearly refute the government’s claims that 1956 was exclusively a Christian nationalist, right-wing revolution,” she insisted.

István Hiller, the head of the party’s national board, said his party would support local governments that can “promote the interests of locals with assistance by the state”.

“We don’t want just elected representatives, we want self-governance, free cities, places for the people to meet freely, free deputies that will present their ideas to the electorate and then implement the will of the voters,” Hiller insisted.

“It is not acceptable that the gap between poor and rich is opening terribly and there is hardly any opportunity for social advancement, much less than we believed and wanted in 1989,” he said.

On the subject of the war in Ukraine, Hiller said “Russia has been the attacker, the agressor, and we cannot take sides with any other party than the one attacked … we want peace, but peace that will do justice to the attacked side,” he said.