Challenger Péter Magyar on Orbán speech: the prime minister executes their proposals

Opposition parties reacted to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech assessing the state of the nation over the past year on Saturday.

Péter Magyar, the leader of the Tisza Party, said Orbán had touched “on no subject relevant to the everyday life of the people … and offered no solution to the cost-of-living crisis.” Magyar said the speech had shown that Orbán was “terrified … trying to cling on by accepting the Tisza Party’s proposals.”

Klára Dobrev, an MEP of the leftist Democratic Coalition, said the measures announced by the prime minister would be “ineffective in reversing the trend of continuous decline”. “Orbán is offering the harsh reality of Russian everyday life,” she said in a statement. Dobrev said that “by assisting [US President Donald] Trump in the most horrific historical, political and human sin of the past 70 years”, Orbán was “putting not just his own honour, but also that of the entire country, on the line”.

László Toroczkai of the Our Homeland party said “Orbán fails to see the difficulties caused by bad legislation and suffocating bureaucracy, and the real reasons of corruption, the crumbling law enforcement and health care, emptying villages, the problems of the railway system, wages, inflation, education and the cost of living.” Orbán had announced “big handouts”, Toroczkai said, adding that “this will have a serious blowback after 2026, because the government refuses to introduce the economic turnabout” necessary to finance it.