EP elections – Opposition parties: “Our future is at stake”

Our future is “truly at stake” at Sunday’s European parliamentary election, the opposition LMP party’s top candidate told a press conference on Saturday, concluding LMP’s election campaign.

Gábor Vágó said that climate change is the greatest current challenge not just for Europe but for the whole world.

Vágó insisted that “we have 10 years to stem climate change and we cannot afford losing a single moment or else our future will be jeopardised”.

Vágó urged voters to support LMP on Sunday, and argued that “votes cast for LMP will reduce the mandates of (ruling) Fidesz.”

The Socialist-Párbeszéd alliance urged people to turn up at the ballot boxes on Sunday’s European parliamentary election and vote to “give the coup de grace to the system of national cooperation”, referring to a slogan of the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democrats (KDNP).

At a press conference concluding the campaign, Socialist leader Bertalan Tóth said the “red-green alliance” fights for a “social” Europe, a European minimum wage, family allowance and pension, a housing scheme and a grant system for disadvantaged youth.

The Socialists-Párbeszéd will fight together against the far-right, he said.

“The fall of the Austrian vice-chancellor [Heinz-Christian Strache] has unveiled” that far-right populist politicians “are only interested in money and power”, Tóth said. They sought to build “a system similar to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s,” he said.

Párbeszéd MEP candidate Benedek Jávor noted that exit polls from other EU states where the elections were held earlier this week show that leftist and green movements are gaining ground rather than populists and Eurosceptics. The leftist-green alliance will determine the future of Europe, he said. The question is whether Hungary will be able to take part in that discourse or be pushed to the sidelines, he said.

The opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) has a good chance to clinch three seats at the European parliamentary election on Sunday, Klára Dobrev, the leftist party’s top candidate said at a press conference on Saturday, and called on voters to cast their ballots for the party.

According to a recent poll, DK has the best chance to obtain three mandates, with its voters coming from ruling Fidesz’s camp, “which is our main opponent,” Dobrev said.

Dobrev called DK’s campaign successful: their main objective, establishing a United States of Europe, is now supported by 72 percent of opposition voters, she said.

DK’s programme is the only alternative to (Prime Minister Viktor) “Orbán’s Euroscepticism”. The aim is a strong Europe, she said.

In Europe, “Orbán is a loser”, Dobrev said, because his allies in the EP will become a “negligible minority”. The question is whether “Hungarians tether themselves to his fate or free themselves from it,” Dobrev said.

Voters at the European parliamentary election on Sunday will decide “if (ruling) Fidesz can isolate Hungary in the international arena, drive it out of the European Union and degrade the country into a dictatorship based on employment slavery”, the opposition Jobbik party’s top candidate said on Saturday.

Márton Gyöngyösi spoke at Jobbik’s campaign closing rally in Győr, in western Hungary, and said that his party offered an alternative to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s programme including “effective measures against migration” and would address issues around Hungarians leaving the country through raising wages.

Gyöngyösi slammed the government for “waging an anti-migrant campaign” while “importing 86,000 migrants from Ukraine, Turkey, and Mongolia” mostly to “replace emigrants with cheap labour” and “cover up the government’s ill-advised economic policy”.

Source: MTI