Opposition parties savage Orbán over Tusványos speech

Hungarian opposition parties on Saturday slammed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for his speech at the annual summer university in Baile Tusnad (Tusnadfürdo), in central Romania.

• Orbán: The point of illiberal politics was Christian freedom

István Ujhelyi, an MEP for the Socialists, said in a statement that Orbaán’s rhetoric could not mask that his family members and friends had “accumulated unprecedented wealth”. Ujhelyi accused the prime minister of creating “a high-handed kleptocratic mafia state” over the past few years.

Neither could he mask “the near collapse of Hungary’s health-care system or the deliberate degrading of the education system,” he said.

“Orbán has declared war on the Europe that subscribes to social values … while fully neglecting the everyday problems of working Hungarians.”

The group spokesman of the leftist Democratic Coalition (DK) berated Orbán’s insistence that the world was either Christian or liberal. “Individual freedom, a nation’s conservation and a strengthening Europe” were not mutually exclusive, Zsolt Gréczy told a press conference.

“Liberal democracy means that I accept that anyone is free to decide about their own future, customs, feelings, belief and faith,” he said, adding that a liberal state governed by the rule of law strengthened the cohesion of nations. “It does not wish to weaken a common Europe of nations but to strengthen it,” he added.

Ferenc Gyurcsány, DK’s leader said on Facebook that Orban’s “decade-long struggle is about nothing other than subjugating Hungarians to his own dictatorial power and creating a sense of constant threat.”

The group leader of the conservative Jobbik party said Orbán “has literally become a butcher of the nation, interested in nothing other than his own mad pursuit of power”.