Fidesz has accused Péter Magyar and the Tisza government of working with political forces in Brussels to drive Hungarian companies out of the country’s construction and transport sectors and replace them with foreign businesses. The opposition party’s parliamentary group issued the statement to the Hungarian news agency MTI on Friday in response to the government’s decision to suspend the Southern Railway Ring project in Budapest and exclude V-Híd, a company linked to businessman Lőrinc Mészáros, from ongoing railway construction works.
Fidesz: ‘This is how they repay campaign support’
“This is how Péter Magyar and Tisza repay their campaign support. This is what is happening with the Southern Railway Ring, and this is what will happen with every major investment,” the statement read.
According to Fidesz, the government is seeking to use allegations of irregularities as a pretext to exclude companies that represent the independence of the Hungarian economy from domestic investment projects, while working with the Brussels bureaucracy.
The party added that the aim was to hand over the implementation of major projects to foreign economic interests. It claimed that the same process was taking place in motorway construction and in what it described as the most significant railway development in Budapest in the past century.
Never miss a headline: join our Messenger group!
Fidesz insists Budapest’s Southern Railway Ring must be built
Fidesz acknowledged that construction of the Southern Railway Ring had already required considerable patience from people living near the works. The party warned that it was now uncertain whether the project would go ahead at all and, if it did, how many years it might be delayed.
Fidesz stressed that, in its view, the Southern Railway Ring was necessary regardless of whether it received EU support.
The party also criticised Transport and Investment Minister Dávid Vitézy, arguing that he was well acquainted with the details of the public procurement procedure.
Vitézy was a member of the supervisory board of the National Infrastructure Development Company (NIF Zrt.), which launched the tender, in 2021. According to Fidesz, the supervisory board approved the procurement procedure.
“It was not suspicious then, and it was not unlawful then. Now, when the project needs to be outsourced abroad, it has suddenly become so,” the statement said. Fidesz concluded by claiming that Hungary’s “recolonisation” was gathering pace and that Vitézy bore personal responsibility for it.
Read more about the topic: Hungary to terminate Southern Railway Ring contract with Mészáros firm to avoid risking billions in EU funding
Companies that win tenders for public works should be the best companies who provide the best work at the best value. Hungary unfortunately now has a long history of shoddy, overpriced development and a legacy of unfinished or completely useless work that that was undertaken by local companies that had political alignment with Fidesz, only to enrich a few oligarchs. This way of working has catastrophically devalued the landscape and aesthetic of many areas now.
If a local company wants to compete for contracts then they can do so fairly by proving themselves capable, that is the reality of free market incentive and healthy competition. I hope local companies step up, because obviously it would be best for a local company to say ‘we can do it better’ and have that be the truth rather than ‘we have lined the pockets of a political party’.
One of the best pieces of modern architecture in the capital is House of Music, and a Japanese company was behind it. That doesn’t mean Hungarians don’t profit from it, it’s beauty or otherwise.
The sort of aspirational intrinsic or at least usual metastability of n>=3-party Systems of government seems to be in peril of degenerating into 2-body, functionally 1<n<2-partisan stuff the way it is in the U.S. where the parties are more interested in self-interest in self than self-interest in collective interests since presumably both Fidesz and Tisza would claim they nonetheless advocate for Hungarian sovereignty as a component of global sovereign interactions as a part of Gaia—scale interactions. One might do well to consider some of the party names of the past that were insufficiently large perhaps as a matter of scale of intent to want to be able to “go it alone” as one might in some card games but in a way that is, as an understatement, frowned upon in the provision in Hungarian Fundamental Law for everyone, not only Citizens, to not only not contribute to, but to resist one-party rule, presumably also in abstractions in various dimensional interpretations (consider the possible blessings and curses of dimensionalities of scale, and thence others). Párbeszéd, Lehet Más Politik, etc.