DK: Government Policies, Impoverishment to Lead to Conflicts

Budapest, August 19 (MTI) – Hungary has more and more poor people due to the government’s policies, which may soon lead to social unrest, Peter Niedermuller, deputy head and MEP of the leftist Democratic Coalition (DK), told MTI today.

Niedermuller referred to European figures which he said indicated a dramatic increase in poverty in Hungary and insisted that social and regional differences were becoming impossible to handle. He said, for example, that the country had 3.3 million people living under the poverty line, with incomes below 65,000 forints (EUR 200) a month.

The politician said that while the situation was slowly improving in the Czech Republic or Poland, there were 100,000 more poor people in Hungary each year.

While Hungary had the best poverty indicators in 2004, when it joined the European Union, it is now one of the poorest members of the community in company with Romania and Bulgaria, Niedermuller said, and insisted that the government’s public works programmes did little else but increase the number of the employed poor.

Photo: dkp.hu

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters